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“Hey, can you go ahead and order for us?” Kara shouts from her bathroom as she turns the shower taps on.
While her upgraded supersuit is basically self-cleaning, her hair isn’t impervious to dirt–or in this case, the viscous bright-orange slime exuded by an Angtuan when they’re drunk off their ass and fighting a human over baseball teams. So it’s taking her longer to clean up than usual, as she explained with profuse apologies when Lena arrived for their planned Friday dinner-and-a-movie.
“Of course,” Lena replies at a normal volume–Kara will hear her anyway.
“Cool. You can use my phone, Food House is on the speed dial list. You know what I always order from there,” Kara adds breezily.
Lena picks up the phone, which was set to recognize her thumbprint a while ago. The first speed dial entry is Alex, followed by–she bites the inside of her cheek–Lena herself, before even Eliza (#3) or J’onn (#4). Food House, the tasty, hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant near Kara’s apartment, is fifth on the list, just above Nia, Kelly, Brainy…and two other take-out places.
Shaking her head and smiling to herself, Lena selects #5. They apparently recognize the phone number, because when she starts to place the order the person rattles it off for her. “Large kung pao chicken, double rice, one order lo mein, three orders steamed potstickers, right? No wait, it’s Friday–so triple rice and add a small sesame tofu with extra veggies?”
“Um, yes,” Lena answers, startled. “How did you–”
“She always orders the same thing when it’s a Friday,” the restaurant worker replies simply. “And we make extra dumplings now whenever Supergirl has a very busy day.”
She thanks him and hangs up, sitting back on the couch. Even before Kara ‘came out’ as Supergirl, quite a few residents of National City did things like that. Little gestures to show their fondness and appreciation for the superhero. But what strikes Lena is the second part of the order: her own sesame tofu with extra veggies, which is apparently such a regular Friday occurrence that even the take-out guy knows it by heart.
Maybe she’s spending too much time at Kara’s, more than even best friends normally would. Maybe Lena’s being too clingy since they rescued her from the Phantom Zone and survived Nyxly and Lex (again). Maybe she’s struggling to keep a lid on the long-simmering crush she’s been ignoring since–nope, don’t go there. Kara is probably tired of having Lena around all the time, in the Tower and in her own apartment, she’s just too kind and polite to say it…Lena fidgets with Kara’s phone and nearly drops it.
“I’m glad you’re here, I missed you this week!” Kara greets her brightly, zipping into the living room while she towels her hair dry. “C’mon, get those shoes off and make yourself at home.”
…
Lena surveys the destruction before them, littering Kara’s coffee table. The cause of most of that destruction, seated on the floor next to the table, is currently polishing off the last steamed dumpling with a somewhat distracting noise of total bliss. Her eyes are closed, head tipped back a little to show the length of her neck, as she relishes the final bite.
“Maybe I should’ve ordered more of those,” Lena says. She’s glad Kara’s eyes are closed, though, or her face might give away her actual feelings about witnessing this. “You really love potstickers, huh?”
Mouth full, Kara makes an agreeing sound. Finally she swallows, opens her eyes, and–to Lena’s further devastation–licks her fingertips.
“I like all kinds of dumplings,” Kara says finally. “Lots of Earth cultures have something like it, little tasty pockets of food wrapped in dough. Pierogies, gyoza, samosas...,”
Lena nods. “Cornish pasties, empanadas too.”
“Right.” Kara brushes a crumb off her pants. “On Krypton there’s something similar called voghsyl. They were one of my favorite foods. I used to buy them from street vendors on my way home from school, fresh and steaming hot.”
She smiles, but her eyes look a little sad now. “Potstickers are probably the closest equivalent on Earth. These ones from Food House in particular. I keep trying dumplings from different restaurants, though, so maybe I’ll find one that’s even closer.”
A pang of sympathy pricks at Lena. “Have you ever tried to make them yourself?”
Kara shakes her head. “We both know my cooking is…hit or miss. And the authentic ingredients don’t exactly exist on Earth.”
That sounds like a challenge to Lena, and a Luthor doesn’t back down from a challenge. Especially not if she can give Kara a little taste of her vanished home.
…
With time and a lot of research, including some discreet questions at Al’s Bar, Lena eventually finds her quarry. It’s a small grocery store sharing a suburban strip-mall with a laundromat, hair salon, travel agent/notary’s office, pupuseria, and Thai restaurant. There’s nothing to overtly advertise the offworld origin of its products, but word nonetheless gets through the grapevine among the aliens who call National City home.
“So…we’re not getting pupusas?” Kara sounds a little disappointed when Lena leads her further down the strip mall sidewalk.
“We can get some after, if you want.” Lena touches her elbow as they reach the store. “Kara, I brought you here because I think we can find the ingredients for voghsyl here.”
Kara grabs her hand, blue eyes wide and shining. “Wha–you–really??” She doesn’t wait for an answer, just tugs Lena along into the store.
The place is cramped, with tall shelves holding imported foodstuffs and things Lena can’t even begin recognize, most labeled in alphabets never used on Earth. She spies a liquid nitrogen freezer towards the back, as well as a deli-style display case full of what looks like dry tumbleweeds the size of soccer balls.
Kara’s eyes go even wider and shinier. She roams up and down the aisles, exclaiming at things she recognizes from her childhood travels in distant star systems. Still being pulled along by the hand, Lena absorbs the delight radiating off her friend like sunshine.
The store owner looks up from restocking a shelf and does a double-take; he’d clearly seen Kara’s TV special. “S–Supergirl?”
“Where did you get all this stuff?! This is amazing!”
She starts talking to the man and, in true journalistic fashion, learns his whole story. Apparently he’s a former Daxamite soldier who went AWOL and defected instead of participating in Rhea’s invasion. He’d survived the lead exposure because his parents weren’t actually native to Daxam—they’d been captured in a neighboring star system and enslaved. Joining the military had been the only way he could earn his way out of slavery, and then free his family.
“They died when Krypton and Daxam were destroyed,” he adds quietly, voice trembling a little.
Kara’s mouth trembles too. “Can I hug you?”
Lena gives them some privacy by exploring the next aisle over and giving some pets to the store cat, who’s lazing atop a crate of…Spam, apparently.
It turns out the store owner not only knows the recipe for the Daxamite equivalent of voghsyl, but also has the ingredients, or as close to them as one could get on this planet. A human hobby gardener is growing off-planet herbs and plants in her greenhouse. Some goods were brought by alien smugglers. A few have such similar analogues on Earth that they’re basically identical—packages of black mustard seeds imported by a South Asian brand, bags of tapioca starch.
Kara fills two baskets with alien food and drinks and seasonings, after Lena insists that it’s her treat to buy them. And it is a treat, truly: seeing the unbridled joy on Kara’s face when she discovers a packaged snack her father brought back from off-planet trips when she was little. Hearing her throaty laugh when the store owner jokes about something in an alien language they apparently both speak.
It’s all worth a hundred times what Lena ultimately pays at the register.
That night Kara attempts to make voghsyl in her kitchen, with Lena as sous chef. It fails, horribly, the wrappers disintegrating in the oil and the contents blackening until the smoke detector goes off and Kara has to clear the smoke out the window with her super-breath. But Kara only laughs once the smoke cleared, and just orders some dumplings of the Earthling variety instead.
“It’ll take a few tries,” she says without concern as they clean up. “I only made these once or twice with my mom and Aunt Astra, mostly we just bought them fresh from a vendor. Plus the oil isn’t quite the same, that kind of plant doesn’t exist here.”
It takes three more tries, in fact, but finally one night they achieve a plateful of mostly-intact, unburned voghsyl.
When Kara bites into the first one, her eyes slip shut and she chews slowly, more slowly than Lena has ever seen her eat any food. When her eyes open again they glisten with tears. She swallows and speaks hoarsely.
“That’s it. That’s it, exactly.” Kara holds the dumpling close to her face and smells it. “It’s exactly how they tasted, on Krypton. Thank you, Lena, I –”
She smiles, then, and starts crying at the same time, setting the dumpling down on the plate.
Without hesitation Lena takes her in her arms. She holds Kara, rubs her back and murmurs soothing words, both of them standing right there in the kitchen with the counters covered in dirtied pans and droplets of oil. And it feels natural, like they could be doing this together for years, cooking and comforting each other.
A short while later, Kara laughs self-consciously and wipes her face. “We better eat these while they’re fresh. Reheating them isn’t the same.”
Lena eats a few—and they truly are delicious, tangy and light and just slightly different from anything she’s ever tasted on Earth—but leaves the bulk of them for Kara. It’s worth every penny’s worth of rare ingredients, every minute spent on the past failed attempts, every shrill shriek of the smoke alarm. It’s worth it, to give back to the woman she loves something from a lost, mourned home, even something as small as a dumpling.
Noticing Kara’s gaze on the last voghsyl, Lena smiles and nudges the plate closer to her. “Go ahead,” she says. “We can always make more.”
…