an: sorry about that, chapters should look fine now. the first one uploaded fine so i didn't check the others, my bad =p
Kara flies into Alex's apartment fast enough that her hanging pictures rattle precariously as she passes, and she only just manages to stop in time to avoid hitting the wall opposite. Alex is waiting for her, phone in one hand and medical kit in the other, because her sister is nothing if not prepared for anything, including late-night explosions and a superhero swooping through her balcony door with an injured Lena Luthor. Alex is alone, which makes sense considering how late it is, but it still feels wrong to Kara's panicked brain. There should be half a dozen people, frantic and shouting 'stat' at each other, not one Alex with sleep-tousled hair and rumpled pyjamas, watching Kara rocket into her apartment with a mixture of concern and alarm.
Lena's properly unconscious now, her arms limp around Kara's neck, but her heartbeat is still a rapid staccato in Kara's ears, and as she follows Alex's pointed finger and eases her as gently as she can down onto the kitchen island – recently swept clear, if the fruit scattered on the ground is any indication – Lena's eyes flutter and she groans softly.
"What happened?" Alex asks, shifting Lena into an approximation of the recovery position and peeling her sodden, ruined shirt away from her back with a gloved hand. It's shredded enough that she doesn't even need to cut it, and Kara blushes and fights the ridiculous urge to turn around when the bra underneath it – looking similarly ragged – snaps apart as Alex slides a finger under the band to check the skin beneath it.
"I don't know, we were just talking and her office exploded," Kara says, vibrating with anxiety and trying to watch over Alex's shoulder without dripping on her. She's only moderately successful, and Alex only tolerates it for a moment before shoving her away and digging through her kit for a small torch, passing it to Kara.
"Hold this, I need my hands," Alex orders, squinting at Lena's injuries and prodding at her back carefully. The harsh white light throws the damage into sharp relief, and Kara winces at the sight of the marred skin. Alex, oblivious to Kara's distress, takes a second to nudge her out of the way with her hip and hooks her foot around one of her bar stools, dragging it close enough to sit on. "How close to the blast was she?"
"I'm not sure. More than five feet, less than twenty." Alex looks up at her and raises an eyebrow, and Kara puts her free hand up defensively. "I don't know where the bomb was! I was…distracted."
"'Distracted', right," Alex mutters, rolling her eyes and returning her attention to her patient. "Grab the black pouch out of my kit."
"Is she gonna be okay?" Kara asks, unrolling what turned out to be an instrument set and leaving it within Alex's reach before moving to the other side of the counter. She knows that if she keeps hovering over her sister's shoulder, Alex will kick her out, and the thought of leaving Lena makes her insides twist unpleasantly.
"She shouldn't be unconscious," Alex says, talking more to herself than Kara as she gently wipes the worst of the blood and grit away. "None of these are deep enough to cause the kind of blood loss that would knock her out this quickly. It could be the shock, but…" She sounds dubious, and Kara can understand why. Lena had treated getting thrown off her balcony as a minor inconvenience, Kara can't imagine her fainting from emotional stress.
"Maybe that has something to do with it," Kara offers, pointing at the piece of metal that's still glowing dully. The skin around it is red and swollen, and it looks like it's trembling in time with Lena's heartbeat.
"Maybe," Alex agrees distractedly. She pokes at the area around it, then yelps and pulls her hand back quickly. "It stings," she mutters, examining her finger. "Okay, that's coming out first. How deep is it?"
Kara squints at the shard with her x-ray vision. "Maybe three quarters of an inch? It's in the muscle but not much further."
"Good. Put your hand here," Alex tells her, guiding Kara's hand onto Lena's shoulder. Her skin is chilled to the touch and Kara fervently hopes it's from the rain, not something worse. "Just hold her still, okay? This is probably gonna hurt."
Kara nods and grips Lena's shoulder as firmly as she can without risking a bruise. Alex selects a large pair of tweezers from the kit at her elbow, prods around the shard gently, then moves to grip the strange metal.
The moment the tweezers touch the shard, Alex drops them with a pained cry, recoiling with enough force to overbalance the stool she's sitting on. Her reflexes kick in quickly enough to keep her on her feet, though she staggers slightly and has to grip the counter for support.
"Alex! Are you okay?" Kara askes, alarmed, and Alex nods, though she's frowning and rubbing her hand.
"It really stings," she repeats, stripping her glove off to survey the damage. There's an angry red imprint on her fingers, raised and in the shape of the tweezers she'd been holding, and she winces when she rubs it. "That has to come out now."
"Let me try," Kara offers as Alex reaches for the tweezers again, and Alex wavers for a moment before giving in with a nod.
"Gloves," Alex reminds her as they swap positions, and Kara scowls at the delay but complies.
Once her hands are appropriately covered, Kara gives the shard an experimental poke. The contact sets off a weird tingling sensation in her finger, like the time a teenaged Alex had made her fish her hair straightener out of the bath without unplugging it first and she'd shorted the power for the whole house, but it doesn't burn her skin the way it did Alex's.
"Okay?" Alex asks, and Kara nods. It's an odd sensation, but it's not painful. "Good. Just pull it straight out."
"Okay. Ready?" Kara asks, feeling suddenly nervous, but Alex nods. Taking a deep breath to steel herself, Kara reaches forward and plucks the shard out of Lena's skin.
The reaction is immediate. Lena opens her eyes with a gasp that makes Kara jump, and she immediately tries to sit up. Alex catches her flailing hands gently, and Kara's free hand – the one not holding the alien metal as far away from the humans as possible – goes immediately to her shoulder to hold her still. Lena fights their hold briefly, her bare feet scrabbling for purchase on the wet countertop, until she twists the wrong way and gasps in pain. She stills, but her eyes keep darting around the room, panicked and unseeing, and Kara moves to the other side of the counter, tossing the metal shard in the direction of the sink as she goes and kneeling down to Lena's eye level. She strips off her gloves with a touch of superspeed and takes Lena's hands, squeezing them gently as Alex shifts aside.
"Lena! Lena, it's okay. Look at me. It's okay, you're safe," Kara says, repeating it like a mantra until Lena's eyes flick between her and Alex and recognition washes over her face.
"Supergirl," she breathes, her eyes softening. "Alex. What happened?" She tries to roll onto her back, but doesn't get far before she stops with a pained groan.
"Careful, you're hurt," Kara cautions, but there's no heat to her words. She'd expected the flood of relief at seeing Lena alive and awake again, but the intensity of the feeling surprises her. She hadn't realised how scared she was, and in the absence of that fear, she's having trouble keeping the smile off her face.
"What happened?" Lena asks again as Alex moves behind her and leans down, resuming her examination of her injuries.
"There was an explosion at L-Corp." Lena stiffens and opens her mouth, but Kara anticipates her next question and goes on quickly, "No one else was hurt. I checked."
Lena lets out a long, slow breath as some of the tension visibly leaves her, and Kara realises suddenly that not only is she still holding Lena's hands, but her thumbs are both rubbing little arcs over her skin. Lena has made no move to withdraw from Kara's grip, and Kara finds that it's less awkward than she expected.
Following rapidly on the heels of that revelation is the realisation that she can see quite a bit more of Lena than she's used to. The front of Lena's blouse held up slightly better than the back, but the fact that Alex had mostly torn it open means that the only things holding it in place are some particularly stubborn threads and the fact that it's still wet enough to cling to the curves of her body. Kara's eyes involuntarily track the path of a tiny droplet of water as it slides over Lena's throat and down along the dip of her collarbone, and it's not until Alex pokes a sensitive spot and Lena flinches that Kara manages to tear her gaze away, surprised to find that her mouth has gone dry.
Inwardly shaking herself and pushing whatever that was to the back of her mind, Kara pulls her eyes back to Lena's face and finds that her friend is watching her with a gentle, almost awestruck smile.
"You saved me," Lena says softly, her eyes glittering in the low light. "Again."
"Always," Kara whispers, squeezing her hands gently. She has the sudden, mad urge to bring Lena's knuckles to her lips, to brush a kiss across her skin, and she's halfway through the motion before she catches herself and freezes, trying to disguise the movement as a shift in position. Judging by the way Lena's eyes flick from their joined hands to Kara's lips and back, she's not successful.
"Speaking of L-Corp," Alex says from the other side of the counter, and Kara jumps slightly. She'd almost forgotten that her sister was there. "You should head back there, Supergirl." There's a subtle emphasis on the last word, and she's shooting Kara her pointed you-just-did-a-thing-that-we'll-discuss-later look. "I'll send some agents to meet you, but they're not gonna get there before the local cops, and if the bomb was alien-made I don't want them stumbling on something that might hurt them."
The thought of leaving Lena, injured as she is, feels wrong on some very deep, visceral level that Kara's too wound up to explore just yet, and Kara tries very hard to communicate that to Alex without actually saying it out loud.
Alex rolls her eyes. "I can hold my own torch, Supergirl. We'll be fine. Go make sure I don't get any other patients tonight."
Kara glares at Alex for another beat, but annoyingly, she's right. "Fine," Kara huffs, standing and reluctantly releasing Lena's hands. "Put your comm in, though," she adds, and Alex rolls her eyes again but complies.
"I should go with you," Lena says, moving to sit up again only to be halted by Alex's hand on her shoulder.
"You're staying here," she tells her, pushing her gently back down. "You can't feel it yet, but I'm not done digging bits of your office out of your back."
"I need to—"
"You need to let me patch you up," Alex interrupts her, using her the-recruit-said-something-dumb tone. "Most of these won't need stiches, but if you let them get infected, getting blown up will be the least of your worries." She pokes something for emphasis that makes Lena flinch and frown over her shoulder, but it obviously works because her posture loosens, and she stops pressing against Alex's hand.
Kara smiles down at her in what she hopes is a reassuring way. "I'll be on comms. You'll know straight away if there's a problem."
"Thank you," Lena murmurs, and when she smiles back, Kara's heart does a warm little flutter in her chest that stays with her even after she throws herself back into the rainy sky.