Chapter Text
“Nia, I had it covered! What the hell were you thinking?”
Brainy frowns at her from the far side of the gurney, J’onn tutting as Alex's eyes narrow. Even Kelly clicks her tongue in disapproval, which, okay. Maybe Lena shouldn't be yelling at an injured young superhero lying breathless in a med bay because she'd taken the full force of a proto-cannon blast meant specifically for Lena. Maybe she should lower her voice, just a little.
Her point still stands, though.
Lena forces a deep breath into her lungs, releases it harshly. "Not that I don't appreciate the sentiment,” she tries again, softer this time, reaching out to lay a hand over Nia's pale fingers. "But my binding spell was almost complete. I had it. You should have been looking out for yourself!”
She can still see it, every time she closes her eyes. The destruction razing the downtown district as Lex and Nyxly and their assorted band of nightmare monsters tried their level best to wipe the Superfriends out one by one. The look on her brother's face as she'd stared him down, the manic glee in his eyes as he'd aimed his gauntlet right at her unprotected head. The dream-shield Nia had thrown up in front of Lena at the very last second, leaving her distracted and oh so exposed to the proto-blast Nyxly had launched at her from behind.
“What were you thinking,” she says again, gentle this time, stroking a thumb over the back of Nia's hand as the young woman squeezes back weakly. “You needed that dream-shield, Nia. You, not me.”
Nia only stares up at her hazily, eyelashes fluttering as Brainy carefully removes her Dreamer mask. “You're okay,” she slurs unsteadily, flinching away from the salve Alex is applying to the angry burn on her side.
Furious, helpless tears well in Lena's eyes. She blinks them back, cradling Nia's soot-streaked hand in both her own. “Of course I'm okay. I was always going to be okay. It's you we need to worry about, thanks to your little shield trick!”
“Alright, enough. Let her rest,” Alex says quietly from the far side of the gurney, unravelling gauze to press against Nia's wound. “What's done is done.”
“Easy for you to say! It's not your fault she's lying on this hospital bed.”
Guilt scorches the back of Lena throat. No one, no one should ever get hurt for her. Especially not sweet Nia. The fear and desperation and blame and regret of the whole agonising battle well up inside her, a flood untempered by the petty defences of her rational mind.
She shrugs off the reassuring hand Kelly lays on her elbow, whirling on her instead. “And you!” she accuses, heart clenching at the sight of the jagged cut on Kelly's forehead that J’onn is painstakingly stitching up. “You only got that because you threw yourself in front of a Metallo that I was already restraining! It never could have gotten free if your shield hadn't deflected my spell!”
"Lena—”
J’onn's voice is soft and appeasing, accompanied by a wave of soothing psychic energy aimed at taming the fire in her veins. Well, not today.
“No,” she snaps, a helpless kind of frenzy bubbling up behind her teeth. “Don't try and calm me down. I want to know what the hell happened back there. Why you, all of you—”
Images flash gunfire-quick behind her eyelids. J’onn abandoning his battle with a Kryptonite-breathing dragon just to put himself between Lena and a burst of Overgirl's laser vision that she'd already thrown up a shield spell to deflect. Brainy knocking her out of the path of Red Tornado only to be blasted into the side of a building himself. Alex using her soldier's gauntlet to conjure a force field between Lena and a rogue White Martian rather than the plasma gun she so desperately needed to take down the nightmare monster that had been hot on her tail.
And Kara, Kara, finally subduing her brother high above the city only to let him go, plummeting down and wrapping Lena in her cape to shield her from Nyxly's Kryptonite cannon.
Not only had Kara taken the full force of the poison – a poison lethal to her but irrelevant to Lena – instead of her, leaving her a crumpled heaving pile on the ground as sickly green threaded beneath golden skin. No, not only that. Her stupid, reckless, idiotic decision had also allowed Lex to level three city blocks with his antimatter gun in the time it had taken her to regain her strength.
Kara's still out there now, trying to mitigate the damage. Securing the wreckage. Searching for survivors.
The sickening totality of it all pushes against Lena's windpipe, spills out of her in a burning rush. "What were you doing?” she manages, shrill and breathless beneath the weight of her guilt. “All of you, what were you thinking? So many stupid decisions, so many— and that formation!”
She thinks back to the way the six of them had lined up in front of her, spread out and ineffective and so, so vulnerable.
“What the hell was that?” she demands, furious gaze falling upon each of them in turn. “What, have you all come up with some kind of protect Lena formation without telling me? A line of defence that leaves you uncoordinated and open to attack? One that, most importantly, I don't fucking need?”
A lot of this anger is misplaced, she knows. But it's easier to feel that than the disbelief, the desperation, the crushing cracking weight of the knowledge that everyone she loves has been hurt today, because of her.
“Will somebody answer me?” she snaps, looking from one rueful face to another. “Will somebody please tell me what the hell is going on?”
A sound at her back, the squeak of hinges, and every pair of eyes in the room that had been studiously avoiding Lena's glare snaps to the figure that's just entered behind her.
Lena whirls, gaze darting from Kara's deer-in-the-headlights expression to the meaningful looks passing between each one of their friends. Her stomach sinks even as her temper flares.
“Kara Zor-El,” she says, tight and meticulously controlled and dangerous as a lit fuse. “You had better tell me whatever everyone else here is refusing to say, and you had better do it right now.”
At her back, Nia lets out a groggy painkiller-fuelled uh oh just as Alex gives her sister a meaningful shove back through the still-open door. “Not here,” Alex says firmly, turning her attention back to her patient as Nia groans in pain. “Take it outside, you two.”
Lena complies, every part of her heart not overcome with righteous indignation breaking over Nia's obvious suffering. The glass doors to the med bay swing shut behind the two of them and Lena stalks to the centre of the training ring, whirling on Kara with fire in her eyes.
“Right,” she snaps, fingers tapping against her folded elbows, foot tapping impatiently against the floorboards. “Explain.”
Kara blinks at her, big and angelic. “Explain what?”
“Don't play cute with me.” Lena's eyes narrow, a muscle in her cheek flickering. “What happened out there today? Why were you all acting so— so recklessly?”
Kara visibly gulps. “We weren't.”
“Bullshit.” Lena takes a furious step closer, the Kryptonian cowering a little at her advance. “Why did all of you leave what you were doing to keep throwing yourselves in front of me? And you, I mean— God, Kara. Why the fuck did you let my brother go?”
Kara's tongue darts out to nervously wet her lips. “You were in danger.”
“We were all in danger!”
“Yeah, but—"” Kara flounders, jaw working. “We're superheroes!”
Lena scoffs. “And what am I, a lawn ornament?”
Blue eyes widen. "No, of course not.”
Lena quirks a brow, arms tightening across her chest. “Well, then?”
“You, uh. You don't have a suit!”
Kara looks pleased with her most recent excuse for all of half a second, before she catches sight of Lena's left eyebrow shooting up to match the right. Then, she just looks scared.
“A suit?” Lena parrots incredulously. “Well, why didn't you say so? If a bit of spandex is all I need to be taken seriously around here, I'll go put on a pair of underwear over my pants right now!”
Red boots shuffle nervously against the floorboards. “No, I didn't mean— it's not the suit. It's, you know, shields. A helmet. Protection.” Kara's earnest gaze, already crippling, ratchets up another notch. “You're vulnerable, Lena.”
“So give me a helmet!” she counters loudly, tone landing just shy of an outright yell. The row of faces watching them through the glass doors of the med bay cringe in unison, but Lena barely notices. "Have Brainy make me a suit! Or better yet, I'll make one myself, and maybe then the lot of you will stop acting like impulsive idiots around me and almost getting yourselves killed in the process!”
Kara's fingers wring, knuckles twisting so tight they bleach white beneath her skin. “We weren't, we— we were just trying to protect you.”
Ire ignites in Lena's veins. “What, because I'm so weak and helpless and human?”
"No, of course n—”
"Need I remind you,” Lena interrupts furiously, “that I have magic? And that even before that, I created technologies that saved the sorry asses of every single one of you superheroes more times than I can count? That without weak, vulnerable, little old me, each and every one of you would be dead?”
“Lena, I know that.” Kara's hands are up, open and appeasing, but the option of a peaceful surrender has long since faded into the rear-view. “We all know that. You're just as much a hero as any one of us. More.”
“Then why won't you take me seriously?” Lena yells, flushed and furious and too far gone to rein it in now. Just when she'd finally felt welcomed, accepted. Just when she'd finally believed she was one of the team. An asset. An equal.
"What the hell was that today?” The words bubble up, hot and humiliating. “All of you circling me, intervening completely unnecessarily. Do you know how condescending that felt? How infantilising?”
Kara's face is crumpling. “We didn't mean—”
"Then what did you mean?” Lena interrupts sharply, jaw clenching. "Because nobody else out there got the treatment I got today. Nobody else got fussed and fretted over. I guess all you real heroes know how to handle yourselves. I guess you just had to make up for my shortcomings.”
“Lena, it wasn't them.” Kara's voice is low, her expression sorrow-filled yet determined. “Don't blame any of them. Blame me. I made them do it.”
That stops her short, cuts her bluster dead in its tracks. “What?”
“It was my call, okay?” Kara's gaze is fixed on the floor, a burning blue so intense Lena wonders absently if she's about to singe two holes clean through the worn wooden boards. “I briefed everyone, before the fight. Everyone but you. And I told them— I told them to protect you. No matter what.”
Lena's mouth opens, then closes, then opens again. She spares a glance at their audience, the row of faces pressed unsurreptitiously to the window. Not one of them will meet her eyes.
“Oh, great,” she manages at length. “So, it's not that my entire family thinks I'm a liability that needs babysitting. It's just that you do.”
“God, no.” Kara reaches up, one hand tugging rough through her ash-caked curls. “I know exactly how capable you are, Lena. No one owes you their life more times over than me. I— I think more highly of you than anyone.”
"Then why?” she gasps, hating herself for the hollow ache that's opened up behind her sternum. An ache momentarily soothed by the reassurance that she's not universally considered the burden of the Superfriends, only to be exacerbated again by the knowledge that that is how she's seen by the one person who matters most.
Kara is silent. Shoulders tight, jaw rigid, biting roughly at the inside of her cheek.
“Why?” Lena snaps again, half-desperate, a whipcrack across the chasm between them. "Why the supervision, why the kid gloves? Why am I different from everyone else?”
Kara's gaze cuts to her face so fast and so hard it's like a physical touch, the intensity of it almost wresting her backwards. Her voice is soft, so soft yet so certain; gossamer wrapped in steel.
“Do you really not know?”
Silence opens up between them, a yawning void of wordless shock.
Kara's throat works as she swallows, fists clenching and unclenching against the tops of her thighs.
“Are you truly asking me that question, Lena?” she breathes, barely audible. “Do you honestly need me to tell you what makes you different? After everything we've been through, do you really need to hear me say that losing you again would kill me?”
Her voice wavers, strung taut like overworked metal. “Do you need to hear me say that I would crush this world to dust before I let that happen?”
Kara shudders, her chest caving, as if the pressure of keeping those words inside had been the only thing keeping her upright. Her knees buckle, body on a collision course with the worn-smooth floor but then Lena is there, arms snaking beneath her shoulders, grip tight around her ribs.
Then Lena is there, and Kara lets out a trembling gasp as she starts to cry and then Lena is kissing her. Kissing her like the world is on fire and they're the only two left, a desperate moment snatched from the jaws of death itself. Kissing her like she's wanted to for years, lips and teeth and tongue and salt and love, love, love.
Lena kisses her because she knows. She kisses Kara like she would set reality itself aflame for her because she could, she would, she has.
And Kara, Kara kisses back the same.
They break apart to a chorus of cheers and muffled clapping, smiling faces beaming through the glass at their backs. Lena's hands slide up, burying themselves in soot-matted hair as their foreheads tilt together, green eyes meeting watery blue.
“From now on, we do this together,” she whispers just as firmly as she can manage with Kara's nose brushing her own, Kara's lips at the corner of her mouth, Kara's fingertips skating the hollow of her throat. "No more secret briefings and reckless plans, do you hear me? In this, in everything, we're a team.”
Kara's mouth moulds hot and desperate to her own once more, saline painting their tongues as she presses her answer between Lena's parted lips. “I hear you,” she breathes, fingers threading into Lena's hair, palms cupping Lena's jaw. “I hear you. I love you.”
Her own tears come then, hot and thick and so, so happy as a woozy voice sounds through the open med bay doors behind them.
“Man,” Nia slurs, drug-dazed and delighted. “I'm gonna get hit by a proto-cannon every day!”