Chapter 2: Dinner

There was snow in her hair. No, not snow, Kara decided as she took in the sight of Lena standing in her doorway, ice. Where the sleet soaked it through and frozen at the tips. Lena was wearing a long, black down coat and a scarf that looked as thick as one of the blankets Kara had been nestled under earlier, but neither of those garments appeared as though they had fared much better. Kara assessed all of this in the time it took for her to draw a breath to speak.

"Lena? Oh, my god, you're freezing, please - " Kara ushered the woman in, and both were glad when the door was shut and the storm outside was successfully sealed out. They laughed a little at the rush of warm air that greeted them from a heating vent above the door.

"Kara," Lena started, but Kara didn't let her finish.

"Lena, it's wonderful to see you," she said, "And believe me, it's great to see that pizza too, but I prefer my Luthors in distinctively-not-frozen-solid form."

Lena rolled her eyes, but she was smiling as she set the pizza down on the table as Kara brushed past her quickly, on the way to her closet.

"Hang your coat on the hook there, I'm going to get you some dry clothes," Kara called, doing a brief mental inventory of her closet. What size does Lena wear? she wondered. Perhaps more importantly, what do I have clean? Tugging open the closet door, she surveyed her options.

Can't go wrong with pajamas, she thought, grabbing a pair of black sweatpants and a thick woven gray sweater, and a set of fuzzy socks to finish off the ensemble. On her way back to the kitchen, she grabbed a spare towel.

"Hey, where do you keep your pizza cutter?" Lena asked as she returned. She was rifling through Kara's silverware drawer and coming up empty. She glanced back at Kara with a furrowed brow, which rapidly smoothed when she saw the pile of clothes that Kara was holding out before her.

"Pajamas and a towel, for your hair," Kara announced, and Lena took the offering with a gracious smile. "My hero," she said, nodding her head slightly, and Kara felt a little blush rise to redden her ears.

"Mind if I run to the bathroom?" Lena asked, holding up the clothes.

"Yeah, of course!" Kara said quickly, stepping aside so Lena could pass by. "Hairdryer's under the sink, if you want to use it."

"Thanks!" Lena called over her shoulder as she ducked into the bathroom. She flicked the light on and closed the door, and Kara turned away, getting two plates down from the cabinet and turning towards the pizza box on the counter.

Kara's heart leapt. Are those… potstickers? A bag sat on top of the pizza box, and opening it revealed that she was correct. It was all she could do to keep from devouring the entire contents of the bag right there, but she exercised what she felt was an admirable degree of control, instead opting to slice the pizza and take out napkins and utensils for the two of them. Then she relocated the entire affair over to where she had been sitting before, on the couch, placing the pizza box and the potsticker to-go container on the coffee table before her.

Kara heard the hairdryer turn on in the bathroom and sighed inwardly. It would be another few minutes, apparently. Part of her knew that Lena wouldn't care if she started without her - come to think of it, Lena would probably encourage it, if she heard how long it had been since Kara had eaten. Still, Kara elected to wait. She waved the mouse around her computer screen, which had faded to her lock image: a photo of her, Alex, Winn, James, and Cat Grant at a Christmas party two years prior. She missed Cat - or "Ms. Grant," as she had so often called her, usually in a tone somewhere between awed and intimidated. She missed her ferocity, her decisiveness, her relentlessness.

I bet Cat Grant could have taken down Agent Liberty with nothing but a stare, thought to herself. Turn him right to stone.

Kara closed her computer again, suddenly very opposed to the idea of revisiting the ungodly number of tabs she must have open, and the article draft that was going nowhere. Wine, she thought, suddenly realizing that she had neglected to get her and Lena anything to drink with the pizza. She stood and went to the kitchen. Or water?

Both. Both is good, she decided, and she fetched the glasses and started to pour. As she did so, she heard the bathroom door swing open behind her.

"Oh, Kara, you could have started without me," came Lena's voice from behind her, and Kara smiled softly to herself as she managed to sandwich the water glasses between her elbows and her sides, carrying one wine glass in each hand, and make her way over to the coffee table with the whole assembly. She didn't look up at her guest until everything had been set down.

Lena was crossing the room to join Kara on the couch. As she walked, she was scrunching her long black hair, now mostly dry, with the towel Kara had given her.

"Thank you for the change of clothes," Lena said as she settled on the other side of the same couch as Kara. She finished with the towel, deftly folded it, and draped it neatly over the armrest of the seat, turning back to her host.

"Where did you get this sweater? It feels like I'm wearing a cloud!" she laughed, and Kara found herself laughing with her.

"Right?" Kara agreed as, unable to wait any longer, she piled her plate with pizza and potstickers. Lena followed suit.

"No clue where I got it, but I've had it for ages. It looks great on you," she said honestly, noticing how the wide crew neck fell unevenly, exposing more of Lena's right collarbone than her left as the woman leaned down to the coffee table and lifted her wine glass delicately to take a sip. Again, Kara felt heat rising, this time in the back of her neck, and she quickly refocused on devouring her pizza.

A few moments passed in comfortable silence as they both ate. Then, Lena piped up, "So, purple, huh?"

"What?"

The woman raised one eyebrow in a near-perfect arch. Then she cast her gaze down to her feet, which were clad in the pair of socks that Kara had put in her stack of clothes. The socks weren't a subtle color, like the black sweatpants or the gray sweater; no, these socks were a loud purple, unapologetic as they come. Kara snorted as Lena wiggled her toes.

"Sorry," she said, "I guess they're not very you, are they? They were the first ones I grabbed, I have others if you want." But Lena was already shaking her head.

"Others? These are…" Lena paused, grinning. "Well, you're right, I wouldn't buy them for myself, they aren't "me," as you said… but they are very you, and they're very comfortable. I rather enjoy them," she declared. She stopped wiggling her toes and readjusted her sitting position, so her feet were tucked under her body as she sat upright, reaching for another slice of pizza, which Kara handed to her.

"Glad to hear it," Kara said as she did so. Kara started digging into the potstickers, then paused. "Hey, when Alex told me she couldn't make it, she said she ordered pizza already, not potstickers, so how did this…" she gestured grandly in the air, already feeling her mood improve after putting some food in her stomach, "…advent of good fortune come to be?"

A little smile pulled at the corners of Lena's mouth. "I was out picking up the pizza order anyway, and I remember you saying that pizza and potstickers is your favorite meal, so really, it wasn't a hard call," she said.

"Well, now who's the hero?" Kara said, poking Lena's knee in a playful nudge as she beamed at her, and the other woman's eyes lingered on hers for a second before looking down a little bashfully. Some of Lena's still-damp hair fell into her face, and Kara suddenly had the strong urge to reach forward and tuck it behind her ear. Even as the thought crossed her mind, Lena did it herself, and Kara found herself intensely taking inventory of the remains of their dinner on the coffee table.

"I'll clear this," she said, and stood up, gathering their dishes and glasses. Lena stood beside her.

"Want me to recycle the box?" she asked, picking up what had held their dinner.

Did we really just eat the entire thing? Kara wondered briefly before realizing yes, that is exactly what they had just done. Lena had reached around her to get the box, and now Kara ducked nimbly under her arm as she headed towards the kitchen to put their dishes in the dishwasher, becoming suddenly very interested in the arrangements of the plates in there.

Dishwasher-loading is a great distraction: I should remember this, Kara thought. She was not entirely sure what she was so intent on distracting herself from… or maybe she was? Kara closed the dishwasher and refilled their water glasses. She didn't know why she was feeling so… damn, she couldn't even put words to it. Off? No, that had too negative a connotation. But there was something off, something that was dancing just past the edges of her subconscious grasp.

Lena returned from recycling the pizza box, and Kara pushed down her feelings of - well, whatever the hell she had been feeling. Whatever this is, I'll deal with it later, Kara resolved to herself.

"More wine?" she asked over her shoulder, and was startled when Lena's answer was closer to her than expected.

"Sure," the woman said from the other side of the counter. Kara poured the wine and held out Lena's glass, which she grasped from her hands. "Thank you," Lena said, and mimed the tipping of an imaginary hat at Kara as she took a slow sip without breaking eye contact.

"No problem," Kara said lightly, taking a sip of her own and wishing that her Kryptonian body could be affected by alcohol. Alas - she could savor the taste, but it was effectively like drinking grape juice to her, without the enjoyable sugar content.

"Shall we sit?" Lena asked, gesturing back to the couch they had left, and Kara nodded, an idea blossoming in her mind. "I'll be right there, just let me refill my water," she said.

The moment Lena turned around, Kara used her super-speed to open the top left cabinet beside the fridge and reach all the way to the back. Carefully - or at least, as carefully as she could, moving at her speeds - she extracted the bottle that was tucked away back there.

Aldebaran rum. It would have the same affects on her as alcohol typically did on humans. It had been a gift from J'onn for her birthday last year. Kara poured out her wine and filled her glass with the rum instead; the wine glasses were dark-colored, and the apartment was lit with lamps, so there were lots of shadows, and Lena wouldn't notice the change in her glass' contents, Kara rationalized. She put the bottle away. Only a few seconds had passed; no longer using super-speed, Kara ran the faucet and refilled her water glass, as she'd said she was going to do, and went to re-join Lena on the couch.

"Have you gotten a lot done these last few days?" Lena asked as she re-settled into her perfectly-positioned pillow spot. Kara took a sip of the rum and immediately felt a warmth as it went down her throat. If this is what alcohol was like for humans, well, she could see the appeal. Kara nodded as she replied.

"Yeah, actually! I'm working on this article, James and Nia - she's the new cub reporter, you've met her, right? - they both think it's really relevant right now, I'm actually thinking of asking Nia to help with some of the research because it's proving to be a much bigger job than I had anticipated…" Kara trailed off. Lena hadn't said anything, but Kara got the feeling that she wanted to.

"What is it?" Kara asked, and Lena pursed her lips, thinking.

"You don't seem sick," she said finally. "You haven't coughed or sneezed once since I've been here. James said you were out this week on medical leave."

Kara felt her heart rate quicken as she listened. She hadn't come up with an alibi for her medical leave, because she'd been expecting to get back to work the next Monday and slide right back into her routine. If she was being honest, saying she had been sick would definitely have been her first go-to, but when Lena had come over, the need to pretend to be ill hadn't even crossed her mind. Kara tried to listen carefully to what Lena was saying, even as a back part of her brain scrambled frantically to try and come up with a reasonable-sounding explanation for her absence.

"And even though Alex didn't say you had the flu, that's what I assumed," Lena was saying, "Since I know you never get shots for it. Not a good strategy, by the way," she tilted her head at Kara, "Since it only takes one unvaccinated carrier to pass a disease on to an unvaccinated person who's vulnerable… but that's not the point." Lena set her wine glass down quietly on the coffee table, then turned her gaze back to Kara, her eyes questioning, her head tilted a few degrees to the side.

"The point is," she said, and Kara could hear so many things layered in her voice - curiosity, concern, compassion, sincerity - "Why did you take off work? What happened?"