A/N: Thank you so much for all your kindness and enthusiasm on the last chapter! Here's the follow-up; there's no Alex in this one, but just know that there will be more Danvers sisters in part three!
Kara circles the globe twice before the sucking of breath seeps into her lungs and clutches her chest in its grasps. She swerves her path toward one of the safest places she knows now, in National City, and sputters forward onto L-Corp's balcony. The solidity of the pavement beneath her buckling elbows jolts a lightning bolt of reality inside her.
If she's going to do this, she needs to do it the right way.
She shreds her supersuit, and with it, any falsities that would betray the crumbling inside her, at the thought of Alex, just blocks away, suddenly unaware of her truth. Of the truth they'd carried together since she stumbled on this planet as a little girl, carrying the weight of a world in her broken heart.
The cape disappears and the tears flood back, amassing at her waterline where she swipes them away while crossing in front of Jess.
There's a shuffling of papers and the sound of them being aligned against the desk before Jess looks up to see Kara passing through, eyes trained on the door to Lena's office. "Mrs. Danvers, are you all right?"
"Is she in there?" Kara asks, voice raspy and grating against the stillness of the hall as the building empties of its usual business, settling into a subdued pace as evening ebbs into night. Her gaze doesn't drift from the door and what lies behind it. Her x-ray vision could tell her Lena's at her desk, amongst immaculate stacks of files, but her powers have cost her people she loves, again, and the thought of using them makes something clench in her chest, more painful with each passing moment.
Jess nods. "She finished up her last meeting of the day forty-five minutes ago. I believe she's just finalizing some notes now."
"Thanks." Kara's eyes flicker over to her for a moment before drifting back to the door. A deep breath rattles her lungs as she reaches out and twists her fingers around the handle. "Have a good night, Jess."
"You as well," Jess replies and returns her attention to the computer on her desk.
The door feels heavier than any steel Kara's lifted, as she pulls it open and lets it fall closed behind her.
"Kara," Lena looks up from her work with a smile. "What a lovely surprise, what are you doing here? I didn't accidentally work through dinner plans or anything, did I?"
Kara shakes her head, drops her tangled fingers from in front of her chest and lets them dangle at her side, rubbing her palms against her jeans. "Lena," she inhales and exhales, and the weight of so many lost worlds bundles on her breath. "There's something I need to tell you."
Those words charge the air, and anticipation rises like steam. Suffocating; spreading.
Lena sets down her pen. The corners of pages flutter at the disturbance.
Kara's fingers tremble around the edge of her glasses and it takes three tries to pull them from her face and another set of seconds that run too long to expose the House of El's crest.
"I'm Supergirl."
Regret slams into her chest like she's losing a fist fight. Her face falls and silent tears surge forward. She's going to lose someone else. The panic clangs inside her like trapped electricity.
"I'm sorry," she whimpers. "I'm so sorry, Lena. I wanted to tell you—I—" Oxygen jumbles in her lungs and her breath stutters. No words are significant to convey the guilt inside her.
Lena's heart drops. "I didn't want to believe it," she whispers and shakes her head slow. "The evidence was piling up, but I didn't want it to be right." She squeezes her eyes shut, too hard, too fast. When she opens them, there's moisture at the edges, and black dots cloud her vision before disintegrating. "I didn't want it to be true, that you'd truly been lying to me for this long. After everything."
"I was terrified, of hurting you," Kara explains, crushing her fingers in her hand. Shame flames through her. "But I understand that in keeping a secret, I only caused more harm. My powers, my identity, me—I have cost so much to the people closest to me, especially to the people closest to me. Even from the very start, when Jerimiah gave up everything to protect me. He went away, we thought he'd died, and it was worse, maybe, somehow; and it never gets better, and Alex just had to have her memory wiped," Kara's breath wheezes in and out of her lungs, her eyes clench shut. Pods and space debris and fire and Alex spark behind her eyelids. The effect is dizzying. "Just—just to protect me, and now there's nothing, Lena, there's nothing—there's nothing, there's nothing," she repeats, squeezing her hands to fists, knuckles burning white. "—there's no one. There's nothing."
Her shoulders jump as if on a string and the room spins as if on an axis. And a hand, warm and soft, slips over her shoulder; and a thumb, with its human-featherlight touch, grazes the top of her supersuit, tracing the ridge between her shirt and the synthetic material that lies beneath—navy and regal and despised by its bearer.
"There is never nothing, Kara," Lena whispers and allows her hand to graze against Kara's tightly wound fist. It's an invitation and Kara clings like it's water that will extinguish the fire in her lungs, squeezing so hard it almost hurts, but Lena only trails her thumb over Kara's knuckle and squeezes back. "What happened to Alex?"
"But I lied to you." Kara murmurs and uses her free hand to wipe at her cheeks. She turns her gaze up to Lena.
"And it stings like I can't describe," Lena admits, "But I have experience with having to give up on people I love over lies and deceit, and I can't go through that again, not with you." Her voice cracks and Kara's eyes stay trained on Lena's face as it remains painfully measured despite the mist in her eyes. "So I'm choosing to believe." She looks at Kara. "For both of us, I'm choosing to believe that everything else was true—is still true."
"It is." Kara nods so hard it makes her dizzy and her blonde waves, mused and wind-tangled, bounce, and water drips from her cheeks.
She wobbles on her feet and Lena steadies her and even when Kara is standing upright, Lena doesn't let go.
"Thank you," Kara says into Lena's shoulder, and though her words are a whisper, they're heavier than anything Lena's heard all night. "For everything," she breathes, "and I'm sorry, Lena, I swear, I'm so—"
"Shh," Lena gently murmurs and lets her hand rub Kara's back as she feels the tears begin to stream from Kara's cheeks again. "Not now. Tell me about Alex, so we can fix this."
"I don't know if that's possible." Kara hiccups, shaking her head and smearing tears across her warm cheeks.
"At least give me a chance."
So Kara speaks and Lena listens, cataloging each piece of information and holding Kara as she cries, even as Lena's own heart sits fractured in her chest.