Chapter 5

Over the next few days, her conversation with Kara, the promise of drinks (Lena refused to say date, even in her head, just in case she managed to jinx it), disappeared from her mind almost entirely. Three of her classes slammed her with deadlines that were unreasonable even by her standards, and Lena found herself buried under a mountain of academic papers and theoretical physics. It was nothing she wouldn't have been able to handle under usual circumstances, but she had spent the better part of a week ignoring her work and fantasising over a certain golden-haired kryptonian. So, she was running a little behind schedule.

There was a strange sense of inertia that came with the workload, trying to catch up on her other classes while spending every other available hour trying to meet her deadlines. Even though Lena was getting the work done she didn't feel as though she was going anywhere. It might have been that the workload had all-but forbidden her from spending time tinkering in the labs or sparing with James, confined to her room as she had been. The lack of movement, of a clear target, it didn't treat her well.

It was something the Alliance had drilled into her. If you're not moving, solider, you're an easy target. The inertia ran counter to her training. It was a state she couldn't let herself be in. It felt like the silence before an ambush, and her nerves kept twitching against it during the few hours respite she allowed herself from work.

Sam, by some small miracle, hadn't mentioned Kara once. Though, buried under her work as she had been, Lena had seen very little of her flatmate since the night they had gotten drunk while she told Sam about Kara.

Gushed about her, Sam would later insist, much to Lena's chagrin.

Her one and only interaction with Sam that had lasted longer than exchanges of greeting and pleasantries had been when her flatmate was trying to get her to relax and take a real break. Sam had insisted Lena needed to accept her help, and in a rare moment of weakness and sleep exhaustion she had been too slow to stop Sam from stealing her datapad. When the device had been tossed back across the room to her, Lena had been treated to a unmistakably female groan and the sight of a head of long, blonde hair, buried between the legs of a brunette. Because, of course, Sam had thought porn would help her relax. It didn't, if anything it had just made Lena even more tense. By the time Lena had grabbed something suitably heavy to throw at her, Sam had ducked out of their apartment, her laugh trailing after her down the halls. Instead, Lena took her vengeance by hiding Sam's vodka in the lockbox alongside her pistol.

It was the end of the week before Lena actually left her apartment. After four days copped up in her room, unable to do anything but put her head down and plough through her workload, Lena's body had been crying out for some time in the outdoors. She had thought about calling James, getting him to meet her at the gym so that they could spar and give her body a real workout, but some vaguely remembered conversation told her that he had classes to attend that day. Instead, Lena opted for a walk over to the campus library. It would give her time outside, and she could get some work done while she was there. Sam would scold her for it, tell her she needed to take time just for herself.

Lena had never been especially good at doing that.

Even before she had signed on with the Alliance, she had always been driven. She set herself goals and she went after them. Joining the Alliance, and all that entailed, had given her the discipline to focus on a level higher than that. Military precision, it was a frightening thing sometimes. After her transfer to the reserves Lena had never really changed her habits. Everything she did, served a very specific purpose. Even sparring with James, despite them developing a friendship, had started simply because he was one of the few people at the gym who wasn't afraid to fight her after learning her history. Sam was something of an exception to that, she had a way of needling at Lena to get her to do things she wouldn't usually do, but even then it was because she was doing those thing with Sam that she did them. Taking time just to take care of herself was alien to her.

Rao was high in the midday sky by the time Lena left her apartment building, bathing the city in warmth and crisp orange light. The walk over to the library was remarkably pleasant. Lena hadn't felt the need to so much as take a jacket with her, and the gentle afternoon breeze washed warm air over her exposed arms.

That Argo had a library at all was something that always baffled Lena a little. On Earth, paper books were all-but extinct, short of the old universities, those with "lineage". On Krypton, a technocracy that was a few centuries ahead of humanity, she had expected paper books to be a thing of the distant past. In fact, it seemed to be the opposite. The library at Argo was one of the largest buildings on campus. It ran to almost a dozen floors, with sections dedicated to entire species, different scientific pursuits, philosophy, religion. It was truly impressive, and somewhere that Lena might have enjoyed spending time in a different life. While almost all of the texts that the library had to offer were also available digitally, there were a handful that, for one reason or another, hadn't been scanned into the system. A number of them were holy books, various tomes that dated back to the times when Krypton had still been a planet of warring clans. One or two of them, the ones that had Lena's attention, were scientific texts that had gotten tied into the same religious dogma as the holy books.

The first thing that hit her when she stepped through into the library was the air-conditioning. To preserve the integrity of the older texts, the library had a very carefully monitored atmospheric system, one that tended to have to work fairly hard to maintain the right temperatures with the warm weather that came with such close proximity to a celestial body.

Glancing down at her omni-tool, Lena doubled-checked the list she had put together for her excursion to the library. Mostly, they were books that she wouldn't be able to check out, the old texts that weren't copied to the digital framework were also restricted to being held in the library. She would have to track them down, then waste a few hours translating the Kryptonese and making notes in her datapad before she would be able to leave. She had also jotted down a few additional texts that she would be able to check out that would help with some of her side-projects, if, of course, she had the time.

Deciding not to waste her time trapsing around in the human section of the library with the vague hope of finding pre-translated copies of the texts, Lena made straight for the kryptonian section. The moment she stepped out of the elevator and onto the kryptonian floor, Lena could sense the difference. Most other floors of the library were a mix of students from all species, but the kryptonian floor always tended up share the airs and graces of its host species. There was a dead silence, even the gentle humming of the atmospheric monitoring system seemed to be reduced significantly. The rows upon rows of shelves were labelled in script that was as alien to Lena as the planet she was on. She had always intended to learn Kryptonese after her arrival at Argo, but with the ubiquity of translation software, she had just never had the drive to do so.

Lena made her way through the shelves of books, omni-tool held up, orange display translating the names of each section as she passed by. The thin scattering of kryptonian students that dotted the floor levelled her with glances that ranged from curious to disapproving as she searched, and in an act of defiance Lena straightened herself into full military stature, refusing to be put out by the prejudice. Not letting herself get distracted, it took Lena less than five minutes to gather up all the books she needed.

She was rounding a corner at the end of a row of shelves, aiming for one of the banks of tables to begin her note-taking, and she stalled. Sat at a desk not ten feet from her was Kara. Her head was down, tapping away furiously at a datapad, stacks of books piled high on the table around her.

The realisation slammed into Lena like a poorly executed tackle. It had been five days she had gotten Kara's omni-tool number, and she hadn't called her, hadn't sent her a message, hadn't so much as acknowledged her. She had wanted to. God, how could she not have done? Lena had spent all of about fifteen minutes in Kara's company and Sam was right, Lena had a serious infatuation with her.

Somehow, Lena's luck when it came to Kara was improbable. She had already lucked out and found her once in the labs when she was beginning to think she'd have to manipulate James into giving her Kara's number. She'd been lucky enough that her nerves hadn't gotten the better of her and that Kara had been interested enough for Lena to get her number. After almost a week of being too busy to think to get in touch with Kara, Lena had lucked out again and quite literally stumbled across her.

Deciding not to let the opportunity get away from her, Lena crossed the rest of the way into the workspace and took a seat at a desk directly opposite Kara. Her head was down, bottom lip pinched between her teeth in concentration, and Lena felt her heart speed up a little at the sight. It was strangely personal moment that Lena was looking in on. No matter how public the area was, the intensity of the look on Kara's face couldn't have made it more clear that the rest of the world was lightyears away from her. It was almost….voyeuristic, and some sexually repressed part of Lena's subconscious flashed images through her mind that could not have been more inappropriate. Because picturing herself bending Kara over the desk and pulling the zipper of her dress down with her teeth was absolutely not the right thing to be thinking about in the middle of a library.

With a remarkable effort of will, Lena pushed that image from her mind.

It couldn't have been another minute before Kara looked up at her, almost as if she had known she was being observed. She had been halfway through typing something into her datapad when her fingers froze and Kara slowly looked up. Kara's eyes landed on her immediately and Lena lost herself for a few moments just admiring the deep blueness she found there. There was a look of pure surprise on Kara's face at the sight of Lena. She couldn't fight down her grin in the face of it. Her smile didn't diminish even as Kara broke her gaze and glanced around the small study-space they were sat in. Lena didn't blame her for being cautious, she had done the same thing before taking a seat herself.

After a moment, Kara's attention returned to her, eyes locking once again as she mouthed.

"Hello, Lena."

In response, without taking her eyes off Kara, Lena brought up her left arm, activated her omni-tool, and made a show of setting it to privacy mode. Kara offered a small nod and repeated the action across the room.

You're intense when you're studying. It's a good look on you.

There was no world in which Lena would have missed the blush that crept immediately onto Kara's cheeks when she received the message. Lena had been able to feel her own heart hammering a bruise against her chest when she had typed it out. She had wanted to say something less subtle, because the images her mind had rattled out at the sight of Kara had very little to do with studying, but that level of boldness seemed a little intimidating to her. For all Kara had done to show Lena she was anything but a normal kryptonian, she was still hesitant to push too hard.

Thank you, Lena.

The reply came in. Then, a moment later.

Tell me, have you always taken every opportunity to show off your arms, or is it a recent development?

Lena's breath caught in her throat, practically choking on the air at how shamelessly she had been called out by Kara. Because maybe, just maybe, the sight of Kara admiring her muscles earlier that week had given her an ego boost that she had wanted to keep riding. Lena had always been comfortable in her own skin. Even before her exercise regime had been bolstered significantly by the Alliance training she had been well aware of her natural beauty. Something about the way Kara had been admiring her though, that had given her a rush that Lena was unaccustomed to.

Deciding to take a risk after Kara's boldness, Lena fired off her reply.

Follow me, and maybe you'll find out.

Kara's eyes snapped back from her omni-tool to Lena, an unvoiced question in them. In answer, Lena stood from her chair, grinned at Kara, and dipped down the aisle of shelves directly behind her. Doing everything she could to ignore the fluttering butterflies that had suddenly decided to take up residence in her chest, Lena walked to the end of the aisle, then paused. A brief glance over her shoulder confirmed that Kara's eyes were still on her, then she turned right and kept walking.

The aisle she had stepped into ran the whole length of the floor of the library, only coming to a stop when it reached the large tinted-glass windows that made up the wall. Lena made her way all the way down to the end of the aisle and stepped into the final row that ran parallel to the windows, the warm light of Rao landing on her as she did.

It was a little over two minutes before she saw Kara stepping into the aisle next to her. There was a look on her face that Lena couldn't quite place, almost as if she hadn't been expecting to find Lena again, but it faded away into a gentle smile the moment they locked eyes again.

"Hello, Lena." Kara said softly, voice lowered even further than one usually would in a library.

Lena decided in that moment, that she didn't want to ever hear another living being speak her name again, because it would never sound as good as it did coming from Kara's lips.

"I'm sorry for not getting in touch sooner," Lena said, all the bravado she had felt at the table burnt away into nerves once again. "I've been snowed under with all the work for my doctorate."

There was no sense of disappointment or annoyance in Kara's face at her explanation, just understanding.

"There is nothing to apologise for, Lena. I remember how difficult my own studies were at that level."

That information stalled Lena in her tracks. Her initial estimation of Kara had put her around Lena's own age. Sure, she knew that kryptonian's had a significantly longer lifespan than that of the average human, but Kara appeared to be a student. She mentored James, yes, but she had told Lena that she had chosen Argo for her studies and she was still there.

"At this level?" Lena asked. "You mean you've already got your doctorate?" Kara inclined her head in the affirmative. "Seriously? I mean you can't be much older than me."

"I joined the Science Guild at what you would call thirteen years old," Kara smiled at her. "Each guild approaches the education of its members differently, but the Science Guild pushes us to start young."

Lena found herself at a loss for words. There were a hundred different questions fighting for prominence at the forefront of her mind. She felt the need to know more, to understand the woman in front of her. No way could she ask all of those questions in the middle of a library though.

"How about you tell me all about it over a drink?" Lena suggested with a confidence that was entirely at odds with the fluttering of her heart. "Tomorrow night?"

Somehow, Kara's smile grew wider. "I would like that, very much."

Tension pooled out of Lena muscles in magnitudes. "There's this bar just off campus in this little human area. It's pretty out of the way and they've usually got some decent music."

"That sounds perfect. Send me the address and I'll meet you there at eight."

The surety in Kara's voice left Lena feeling off-balance. Not trusting her voice, Lena simply nodded.

Kara took another step towards her, and laid one hand on Lena's upper arm. "I'm very glad we ran into each other today, Lena."

With that, she turned on a heel and retreated back towards her desk, leaving Lena standing with a goofy smile on her lips and a burning warmth where Kara's hand had been seconds before.