Snapper is mean, but I'm worth better than that. Snapper is mean, but I'm worth better than that. Kara's new mantra is admittedly a bit singular, but it's keeping her sane as she busies her hands with baking. The kitchen counter is already littered with various cookie trays, that Kelly will no doubt frown upon because baking isn't therapy, but she can't stop. It's all she can do to will her hands to do something other than strangling her boss.

She followed Alex's advice, and presented him with a fully researched article on LCorp's new technology using just enough superspeed to get it done before Dey. Snapper didn't even read it. She would have been happy with a draft bleeding red from all the corrections, but Snapper just tore it in two without looking. He's mean, he's mean, he's mean, but Kara will rise above it.

To top off the awful past couple of days, the DEO found seven new victims of their unidentified drug with no way to track it down to its source. One of them is still alive, staring into the distance with a happy smile and hooked to life support, but if he doesn't come back, it will be of little use. It's even more frustrating when she knows that if they had more informations, it wouldn't take much convincing to get a green light from the DEO to write something about it, something that might get her an upgrade from puff pieces.

So for now, she bakes, and maybe she'll leave work early tomorrow and go to the animal shelter ; thinks will be alright.

"Get out of here !"

The shout from next door breaks her concentration and an egg cracks open in her hand.

"Come on Lena we need to talk."

"We already talked. Get the fuck out of my home !"

"Don't be irrational. We need to talk."

"Irrational ? I'm being irrational ? You broke into my apartment Veronica !"

"You're being dramatic Lena."

"Let go of me ! You're hurti…"

Covered in flour and eggs, Kara is out the door before Lena can finish her plea.

The door of her apartment is open which saves Kara the trouble of kicking it down, but leaves her with no time to prepare for the scene unraveling in front of her. Veronica is towering over Lena, her hand wrapped around her wrist in a way that can only be described as painful. Kara allows herself two seconds, two seconds to remember that humans are fragile, two seconds to breathe and not jump head first. She gives one of these two seconds to Veronica, giving her a chance to obey and let go of Lena. Only when she doesn't does she steps inside of Lena's home.

"I believe she asked you to let go of her," she says in a cold and measured voice.

"You again," Veronica sneers when she takes notice of Kara's presence.

"Let her go."

"Stay out of this Miss Danvers. This is a private matter."

"Lena, do you want me to go ?" Kara asks cautiously, deeply aware that her question could put Lena on the spot.

"I," Lena tries to answer, her raged breathing preventing her from truly forming a coherent sentence. "I want quiet."

"You can't just break up with me. We need to talk," Veronica cuts, tightening her grip on Lena's wrist.

"I want you to go," Lena mumbles.

"You've heard her Sinclair," Kara says, taking a couple of steps further into the room. "You're going to need to step out."

"Stay out of it. This is between me and my girlfriend."

"I do believe Lena just mentioned the two of you breaking up."

"She's not in her right mind," Veronica says harshly, still not moving an inch.

Swiftly, without even meaning to, Kara reaches forward and takes hold of Veronica's wrist, pressing until she lets go of Lena with a pained yelp. "Out," she says, subconsciously baring her teeth threateningly.

Kara is the one towering over Veronica now and she doesn't hide her satisfaction at the hint of fear that shades her eyes. Carefully, she manoeuvres her body until she's positioned between Lena and Veronica, shielding her friend with the sheer strength that radiates from her. The taller she stands, the smaller Veronica seems and after a couple of seconds and missed heart beats, she relents, trying to shake Kara's grasp and motioning towards the door.

"I can see myself out," she says in a way that is meant to be powerful but is closer to a squeak in which Kara takes great satisfaction.

"Let me walk you out," she answers with a polite and frightening smile, all but dragging her out of the apartment until she can slam the door behind her.

"Is there anything I can do ?" she asks, walking back to Lena at a deliberately human pace. "Anyone I can call ? I can go if you'd rather be alone."

Lena doesn't answer. She seems frozen in time, staring at her in disbelief, clearly struggling to catch up with what just happened. In turn, Kara doesn't dare to move, treating Lena like a wild animal that could bolt at any moment. A beat pass, and another ; eventually Lena speaks, mutters a couple of words that seem to take all of her remaining energy. "Can I, can I get five minutes of quiet, please ?" She moves to the couch sitting down with an air of dizziness. "Would you mind staying with me ? I'm not sure I can be alone," she adds in a small voice, so low actually that it's almost like she doesn't want Kara to hear her so that if she were to leave now, it would only be because she didn't hear and not because she doesn't care. The look of surprise on her face when Kara does sit down next to her is heartbreaking.

They sit like that for a while, in complete silence except for Lena's increasingly calmer breaths. More than five minutes pass, but Kara doesn't move at all because neither does Lena ; she seems to need this moment of peace. Little by little, the tension seeps out of the apartment and filled by two people, it seems less still, more lived in. There still isn't one thing out of place, but as Lena dozes off on the couch, the place seems warmer, more comfortable. That is until she springs up from her half sleep staring around in utter fear and the apartment is drenched in cold again. She looks at the door like an army is about to burst through it, or more likely, Veronica.

"You can sleep over at my place tonight," Kara says before she has the time to ponder if it's an appropriate offer. "Until you have the time to change the lock." Lena looks at her like she'd forgotten she was even here, her heartbeat spiking up before she realises it's only her. "I don't really know what happened between the two of you, but she had no right to invade your private space, and I won't let her do that again."

"I've never been to your apartment," Lena whispers, "I can't sleep there."

"Then we can stay up and watch cartoons. Or I can stay here with you if you don't want to be alone, and tomorrow I'll change your lock."

"I can't ask that much of you."

"You're not asking, I'm offering," Kara says firmly. "And honestly, I'd feel better if you'd let me keep an eye on you, at least until we're sure she won't come back."

"Cartoons do sound good," Lena relents with an uneasy smile. "I won't be able to sleep anyway. But I need to check something in my bedroom first, if that's okay."

"Take all the time you need. I'll wait for you right here."

Lena looks at her with an air that she can't decipher. She stares for a little longer than she should, for a little longer than she probably realises, and then stands up, and walks towards her bedroom, a bit unsteady, extremely cautious.

Lena is sitting so stiffly that Kara is starting to wonder if she's made of stone instead of flesh and muscles. She wouldn't be surprised if that were the case ; there's something so ethereal about Lena's beauty, that, even in the blue light of the television, she doesn't look entirely human. The harsh light enhances the sharpness of her jaw and Kara can see her gritting her teeth. On the plate before her lay three quarters of a cookie, three actual quarters, because she's cut it in four equal parts with great care. She's staring right ahead but Kara can tell she isn't really paying attention to the cartoon she selected at random. She wants to ask her how she's doing but can't tell if the question would be welcomed. She shivers and Kara realises she's let the window open ; she herself can't really feel the cold and she likes the fresh air. Wordlessly, she drapes a blanket on her shoulders, the same one she brought on the roof hoping to find Lena there.

"You really like lavender," Lena says, startling them both as it's the first time she speaks since she set foot in the apartment.

"Oh," Kara says, noticing the strong smell she forgets most of the time. "My sister is arachnophobic, but I don't want to kill spiders and I read somewhere that lavender keeps them away."

"I'm arachnophobic too," Lena says, finally moving to glance at Kara while she tightens the blanket around her. Kara would swear she inhales deeply when she brings the fabric closer to her face. "I know it's irrational, but spiders really creeps me out."

"Humans have a lot of irrational fears."

"We do," Lena says, not picking up on Kara's slip up, or maybe not noticing at all.

Bending forward, she reaches out for the rest of her cookie, picking up the three pieces and stacking them to put them in her mouth. "I like it," she says with a small smile. There's a crumb stuck to her lips and it fills Kara with the desire to touch them ; she doesn't. "The smell," Lena adds, "well the cookie too, you're an amazing baker. But I like the smell, it's, I don't know, safe."

"That's also what I associate it with. Safety. My adoptive mother keeps cushion full of it around the house. It doesn't just ward off spiders it's also a piece of my second home."

"She sounds nice, you're adoptive mother," Lena says, reaching out for another cookie.

"She is. I got really lucky."

"May I ask how it was, losing your birth family so late ?" Lena asks tentatively. "Most of the time I don't remember my mum unless I have a picture right in front of me, but I suppose it must be different for you."

"It's hard," Kara replies, swallowing back a sigh and forcing her body to stay lax. "Not a day passes during which I don't think about them. All of them. I have nightmares, and bad days. They died in an, an accident. Big fire. I'm claustrophobic, I avoid enclosed space like cars, or elevators. I don't take crowded trains because I need to be able to exit at any time. But my sister really helped me. I would have gone crazy without her."

"You took the elevator with me," Lena whispers, her voice teetering on astonishment.

"You needed someone to stay with you," Kara shrugs, "so I did. I spend a lot of time on the roof, maybe you noticed." She punctuates her statement with an empty laugh ; most of her laughs regarding Krypton are tainted by emptiness. "I like to be able to look at the stars, they make me feel closer to them. I'm really afraid to forget about them. I fear that one day I'll wake up and I won't remember the way my father smiled or the colour of the dress my mum was wearing when she died."

"What colour was her dress ?" Lena prompts easily and Kara is so grateful that she almost forgets to answer.

"It was blue."

"See," Lena says, "you remember."

"I remember," Kara confirms. "Do you really remember nothing at all about your own mum ?" she asks after a while with the slightest hesitancy, afraid that she's going to cross a line that would cut the conversation short and cause Lena to retreat in her shell. She's talking now, and looks less ready to implode, but Kara knows she doesn't know her enough yet to be acquainted with all of her triggers.

For a couple of seconds that last for a couple of years, Lena indeed looks like she's not going to answer ; but she does. "I think she must have liked tea," she says slowly. "It always smelled like freshly brewed breakfast tea in her house. Sometimes I hope she drank Barry's Gold Blend, the one that comes in the red box, because it's also the one I drink, but truly, I don't know."

She looks sad, but also like she wants to keep on talking, like it's something she doesn't talk much about and therefore have a lot to say.

"Does tea reminds you of home ?" Kara asks, a lot more confident in her probing now than she was moments ago.

"It makes me feel warm, but I'm not sure Ireland ever really was my home. My father sent me to boarding school there because he thought I should learn about my roots, and then I cultivated the accent to annoy my mother, but ultimately, I think my home was were my brother was, and by proxy the manor."

Her last words are almost inaudible, tainted by shame and a hint of fear. Kara thinks she understands where it comes from, but hesitates before she acknowledges it.

"You're allowed to miss your brother."

"He is a murderer," Lena says, her voice lacking the usual bite associated with this word.

"He is. But he was your brother first and you're allowed to remember him as such."

"The rest of the world doesn't agree with you," she says sadly. "Veronica doesn't agree with you," she adds, saying her ex-girlfriend's name for the first time since she stepped into Kara's home.

"I'm not the rest of the world. And I certainly am not Veronica Sinclair."

"I am Lena Luthor, you do know that, right ? What the rest of the world thinks of me follows me everywhere and taints everyone I get close to."

"I do know who you are. I'm a huge fan of your work," Kara says, rolling her eyes exaggeratedly in the hope of making her smile. "But to me you mostly are Lena, my neighbour and friend, and I don't care what the rest of the world says. And just to be clear, I genuinely like you, I don't want to befriend you just to get exclusives or anything relating to my job."

"Why not ?" Lena asks, her brow creased by a frown halfway between mistrust and disbelief.

"I wouldn't abuse your trust like that."

"That's all ?"

"Does there need to be another reason ? Because I honestly just think that if you trust me with your friendship it's precious enough to not risk losing."

"We barely know each other," Lena says. "I know you said you want us to be friends, but how do you know I'm worth it ?" Her tone is bordering on self-deprecation, her shoulders dropping inward, her gaze falling to her knees ; Kara doesn't like that.

"First of all," she says, choosing the goofy approach, "we've talked adoption trauma so we're basically best buddies at this point." She refrains from shouldering her playfully but her statement still elicits a small smile from Lena, the curling of her mouth animating her delicate profile. "I also have a good feeling about you, and I'm rarely wrong about people. I think you're worth it, and I truly want to get to know you."

Lena's smile falls again, a glimmer of self hatred briefly shadowing her face. She doesn't say anything back, and before Kara can assert once more her desire to get to know her, a loud pop resonates through the apartment, and next door, and in the next building, and the next one over, and the room is plunged in darkness.

Lena immediately tenses beside her, her body radiating discomfort. Her neighbour's uneasiness is the only thing that prevents Kara from freaking out herself. Complete darkness reminds her of the Phantom Zone and there always is a second between the moment the lights go out and the moment she remembers her powers during which she feels unreasonably uncomfortable. With her enhanced vision, Kara can see Lena's eyes quickly shifting from side to side and she wonders if she's mentally cataloguing the escape routes she can discern in the dark ; she used to do it too.

"It's just a power cut," she says, to herself as much as to Lena, "I have candles somewhere."

Her reassurance does nothing to alleviate the pounding of Lena's heart ; her body doesn't loosen either. She's on high alert, which, after the day Kara assumes she's had, isn't much of a surprise. She sets off in her quest of candles, berating herself when she doesn't find them in any sensible place. She knows she's got some in her bedroom but those are expensive and reserved for Rao. She vaguely remembers Alex telling her she should always have some in an accessible place and she knows Eliza keeps hers in the kitchen but she's checked four drawers already and can't find them.

"You didn't check the TV drawer," Lena mumbles from the couch. "That's one other thing I remember from my birth mum, she kept her candles in the TV drawer." She hasn't moved an inch, except for her eyes that are now closed tightly like mixing the darkness of the room with a blackness she willingly created will somehow make the situation less frightening. "That's a weird thing to remember, why do I remember that ?" she adds in a bewildered whisper.

Sure enough, Kara finds the candles in the TV drawer. She doesn't remember putting them there in the first place. She doesn't have matches though, and she's glad Lena is closing her eyes because she doesn't know if she's willing to explain why lasers are coming out of hers. It's a story for another time.

Once the room is basked in the warm glow of the flames, Lena relaxes slightly, her shoulders uncoiling, her fists untightening.

"I'm sorry," she says sheepishly, "I'm not a fan of the dark."

"No need to apologise for that. I don't like it much either."

"But you were so calm."

"That's my St Bernard complex, when I see someone more distressed than I am, my rescuer's instincts kick in."

"St Bernard ?" Lena repeats, amusement replacing her previous torments.

"Yeah. You know the big mountain dogs ? They're used to rescue people."

"I know what a St Bernard is, I've just never heard anyone calling themselves that."

"That's how my adoptive father used to call me. I had a tendency to want to save people with little thoughts for the consequences." More like rescue babies out of car crash, but Lena doesn't need to know that.

"That's, that's a fun nickname," Lena says, her words interrupted by a yawn that scrunches up her face adorably. "Is he dead ? You said 'used to'."

"You can take my bed," Kara says, rising from the couch at the sharp pain that sometimes still cuts her breath when she thinks about Jeremiah. "We suppose he's dead," she adds, turning her back to Lena and busying herself with rearranging the candles. "He worked for the FBI and they didn't find a body."

Behind her Lena gets up too and Kara doesn't need to turn around to sense the comforting hand hesitantly suspended between their two bodies. The existence of this gesture makes it easier to breathe. "I'm sorry. It must be hard to grieve when you never saw the body." Lena says. "I'll sleep on the couch, I don't want to deprive you of your bed."

"You're not depriving me of anything, I'm offering."

"I wouldn't," Lena starts before stopping, words coating her tongue but never making it past her lips. "It's your bed," she says finally, looking at Kara with eyes that beg for her to understand.

Kara looks at her for a while, taking in the shy and tired figure standing in the dancing glow of the lights ; it seems important to be looking at her right now. "Okay," she eventually says. "I'll get you a blanket and a pillow."

Kara doesn't go to bed immediately ; instead, she lingers on the doorstep of her bedroom, keeping Lena's soft silhouette in her line of sight. She tells herself she's just checking if everything is alright, if Lena is comfortable ; but she hovers like that until well after she's asleep. There's something fascinating about this half asleep Lena. She's less guarded, looks younger. Her body relaxes inches by inches until she's nothing but the shape of a woman under a blanket with no trace of the day's hardships. Kara is vaguely aware that her staring is bordering on creepy, but if Lena notices, she doesn't seem to mind.

When she does get into bed, it takes her a while to actually fall asleep. Her mind is much too loud to let her rest. She thinks about Lex Luthor, about how before she said those words to Lena, she had never considered him as a man, but now that she has, she can only think about him in relation to Lena. She thinks about Jeremiah and the concrete pain of his disappearance, so different from the phantom ache of Krypton's destruction.

In her dreams, Alex chases her in the Lexosuit. She screams words that Kara doesn't quite grasp as she runs away.

She awakes to a loud and painful buzzing that seems to be coming from inside her head. It most probably comes from her phone, she decides when she notices it ringing next to her.

"Alex ? What's happening ?" she mumbles when she manages to pick up.

"Someone broke into the DEO," Alex says without preamble. "They used the power cut and the back up generator didn't kick in.

"Do you need help rounding up prisoners ?" Kara asks, thinking about Lena waking up alone in an unfamiliar place.

"We've got that under control. But the pill's missing. And Doctor Veritas' notes."

"And the user ?"

"Dead," Alex says plainly, her voice cold and professional even through the phone. "Not because of the failing life support. His throat was slit. So we literally have nothing."

"I could get down to the alien bar ?" Kara suggests sleepily, her half asleep brain not quite processing the viability of her idea. "Ask around a little, say I want drugs."

"We only found human users."

"But it seems to be an alien drug. And we've got to start somewhere."

"It's not a good idea," Alex says, her DEO agent mask cracking to let the big sister slips through. "It could be dangerous."

"Do you have a better idea ? Because I don't."

There's brief pause, a tensed silence during which Kara can only hear the thrumming of the line, and her sister breathing on the other side, and Lena's heartbeat in the next room. Eventually, Alex speaks again. "I'll come with you then," she says with a tone that calls for no questioning.

"It would be dangerous for you."

"I'm a field trained agent."

"And I'm virtually indestructible."

"We make a pretty good team."

Kara doesn't have a counterargument for that.