Chapter Fourteen: Timing's a Hell of a Thing, Huh?

Lena was dreaming peacefully of untouched prairies and wild horses when the sharp ringing of her phone on the dresser woke her abruptly from her sleep. She hated it when it did that. The sun was in the sky and Kara was still in bed. To no wonder, the blonde had exhausted herself physically and emotionally the day before with the added fact that they had stayed up well into the night bringing each other little deaths and fits of laughter.

The ringing did not stop, no matter how much Lena quietly begged it to. Her phone lit up again with a second and third call before she groaned and huffed her way out of bed to yank it off the top of the dresser. Sam's name and a picture of them both grinning wide, each with an ice cream cone from the last time she visited Lena in New York City appeared on her screen. The time read a quarter 'til seven am. It had been her intention to at least try and sleep past nine o'clock for the next few mornings, but Lena needed the damn thing to quit making noise first. She sleepily tapped the green icon to answer with no attempt to hide the grumble in her voice.

"Sam, do you know how earl—" She began.

"Is Kara with you?" Sam cut her off.

Lena bristled at the interruption and whisked herself more awake with a small shake of her shoulders. "Yes, actually—"

"Can you get her please? Alex has been trying to call her all morning."

Lena's eyes widened. She was definitely awake now. "Sam, is something wrong?" Lena knew every tone of her best friend's voice from excited to anxious, to woeful and even panicked. This was without a doubt the most panicked that she had ever heard her.

"Yes." Sam answered. "Can you get Kara, please?" Lena heard some light shuffling on the other end of the phone and then Alex's voice rang through.

"Kara?" Her voice was deep and a bit hoarse, like she had either been yelling or crying. Or possibly both.

"Hang on Alex, let me get her…" Lena replied hurriedly, her heartbeat threatening to move north and choke the life from her. She quickly moved back toward the bed where Kara still slumbered soundly and shook her by an arm.

"Kara- Kara, wake up!" Lena continued to shake the blonde until she began to rouse from her sleep, her eyes squinting up at the raven-haired woman with a confused look. "Alex is on the phone- you have to wake up…"

Kara sat up slowly and took the phone from Lena, nearly dropping it down into her lap before putting it to her ear. "Hello…?"

"Kara! Why the hell aren't you answering your phone?!" Alex shouted.

Lena could hear Kara's sister through the phone as she stood above her with a hand frightfully pawing at her elbow.

Kara jumped slightly and bobbed her ear away instinctively from the loud voice. "I dunno Alex, geez, it's probably dead, why are you yellin'—"

"Little sister, you need to come home." Alex said quickly.

That got Kara's attention. Her back went ramrod straight with her eyes wide open in an instant, all remnants of grogginess having sloughed off in the blink of an eye.

"What's wrong?" The blonde's voice was riddled with a deep and haunting concern.

Alex let out a half-sob into the phone then. "It's Mama… There's been an accident. Go, Kara. Hurry."

After having scraped her belongings together as quickly as humanly possible, Kara rushed with a fog in her head to get on the road. An undeniably grave feeling hung low in the pit of her stomach every time the thought of home crossed her mind. It threatened her with bile up the length of her esophagus, making her halt the stuffing of clothes into her duffel bag with the faint urge to become sick. Alex didn't have much else to say on the phone earlier other than the fact that she'd gotten a call early that morning from Hank. He'd apparently whisked Eliza to the emergency clinic outside of town after having witnessed her crash her car on Main Street, just in front of his shop. From there she'd been shuttled to a hospital in Austin where additional scans had been ordered.

Lena wouldn't hear a word about not needing to come with her. It had been "Whisht, Kara, I'll be right behind you" and that was the end of it. She followed Kara the entire way.

Sam was waiting in the lobby of the western most wing of the hospital as Lena and Kara hurried inside. She signaled to the woman at the desk that the blonde was the one she had been waiting on and then Kara was ushered beyond a set of double doors toward a long hall of recovery rooms. She'd lost count of how many doors that came after but was eventually led to a room with her sister in it, who stood at the foot of a bed where her mother laid; alive and bandaged, but unconscious.

"Alex…" Kara's voice was small, but Alex snapped her head up with the sound of it.

The sisters ran each other into a hug, and Kara felt some of the tightness in her chest dissipate finally. "What happened?" She asked, still slightly frantic but for the most part relieved to see Eliza in one piece… if not banged up and bruised like a birthday piñata.

"She ran her damn car into the one stop light pole in town, Hank saw the whole thing." Alex explained and then exhaled tiredly with her hands on her hips. "They ended up having to bring her here in an ambulance to take x-rays and then they drilled a goddamn hole into her skull…" Suddenly aware of the volume of her voice, Alex placed a palm over her mouth. Her eyes were red and swollen from crying and looked as though they were on verge of tears yet again. She sniffled and continued, "They won't tell me if she'll wake up. They said it's too soon to tell, and that they can't say definitively one way or the other if she will or not." Her voice cracked as she finished.

Kara's heart dropped and thudded solidly at her feet.

The room around her suddenly felt very big as she gripped a hand on the end of her mother's bed to keep from floating away. Cutting through the intense ringing in her ears was the sound of the latch on the door behind her as Sam and Lena walked into the room. Kara could hear Lena's voice and could sense her presence, but her vision was a total blur at this point. She wheeled around and threw herself into the nearest body, where Lena caught her with open arms. In a desperate attempt to fling herself toward something that felt safe, Kara tucked her face into the crook of Lena's neck and breathed her in. Circles on her upper back helped to ground her, if only a little bit. Kara instantly wished to be anywhere else, and for this to all be a bad dream. A very, very bad dream. The thought of it consumed her.

If we could just go back to this morning…

It seems so easy to just go back to this morning.

Different nurses and hospital personnel shuffled in and out of the small room for hours afterward. The surgeon on hand had stopped by maybe an hour after Kara and Lena arrived just to reiterate the life-saving steps that were taken earlier in the day and to close out his shift. He had said that with the scans from earlier that day which prompted the emergency craniotomy that there were "concerning factors" in reference to Eliza's brain imaging. He finished by saying that someone would stop by the next day to give them more information after they could go over the images more thoroughly, to which Alex assured him that they would be there.

Sam eventually managed to drag Lena away long enough to grab a few things from the house that the sisters would need if they planned to stay at Eliza's side for the night. Neither of whom could hardly bear to leave the room for more than a few minutes at a time. Kara spent a very restless night climbing in and out of a reclining chair just to place the back of her hand under her mother's nose to feel her breathing. She wasn't sure why she didn't quite trust all the machines, or even the pulse oximeter that read a steady 98% oxygen saturation and a resting heart rate from where it was attached to one of Eliza's forefingers. Kara glanced up at the digital clock on the wall across the room. It was well after three o'clock in the morning and for the life of her, she just couldn't sit still. Kara longed for Lena's warm body next to hers, but both her and Sam were safely tucked away back at the house across town. The hospital room was only large enough for the sisters anyway, and hospital staff practically had to drag a pregnant and agitated Sam away from her wife at the end of visiting hours.

"Can't sleep?" Alex's voice was muffled from under the scratchy blanket that she had tucked over her head like a cocoon.

"Afraid to." Kara replied, heaving a sigh.

"Then… talk to me."

"About what?" Kara asked.

Alex dragged the edge of the blanket down over her face, mussing her dark auburn hair a bit and revealing her swollen and exhausted eyes. "Anything." Then she paused for a moment. "Remember that summer when we were kids and you had to sleep in my room because Daddy insisted on fixing the hole in the roof over your room himself, which took him forever?"

Kara scoffed. "It was like two weeks."

"That was a large chunk of my summer you bit into." Alex laughed quietly. "But do you remember talking so much every night that I had to beg you to shut up?"

Kara wrinkled her brow in thought. "I suppose so?" The blonde glanced back at the different colored numbers on the machines next to Eliza's bed when another monotonous beep came from the display. Shaking it off, she decided to appease her sister's attempt at conversation, knowing full well it was to keep her from driving herself crazy all night.

"What did we even talk about?" Kara continued.

"The keyword was 'you', Kara, you did all of the talking." Alex teased, which finally got a small chuckle out of her sister. A first in about fifteen hours, which was probably the longest Alex had seen Kara go without a smile since the first few weeks after becoming a part of their family all those years ago. The same could be said for the weeks after Jeremiah's passing. The blonde was aware of the way she sometimes retreated inwardly and how upsetting it was for her sister, but breaking that habit apparently was easier said than done.

Alex stared up at the boring gray-ish ceiling tiles and pondered in thought for a few short moments. "Oh! It was Polly Pocket! God, kid, you were obsessed. All you wanted to do was talk about your damn Polly Pocket sets. Drove me up the wall." Alex laughed with her shoulders now.

Kara's head reeled at the near-lost memory. "That's right! You turned your nose up at Polly Pocket! Who does that?"

"Listen, I had lots of older kid business going on—"

Kara interrupted playfully, "Yeah like pushing that Lord kid off the hayride at the Train and Grain festival because he tried to kiss you?"

"Exactly." Alex closed her eyes and raised her brow agreeingly.

"Older kid business." Kara mimicked.

They each laughed and squirmed uncomfortably in their chairs, both starting to feel slightly better. The distraction had been a welcome one. Kara admired how good her sister was at doing that. She had lots of practice after all, she figured. Running into her bedroom to console her during her night terrors, guarding her in the school bathroom whenever she had panic attacks and talking her through them… She realized that Alex had been the one to instill her talkative nature to begin with, and was also surely to blame for her sense of humor as well. Sam had mentioned once that Kara and her sister seemed to laugh at almost the same things, and even found the same parts of the same movies humorous when others didn't necessarily.

Alex had taught her how to open up, and after Jeremiah, it was like she shut as tight as a vault. Kara had been forever changed… or had at least been a very diluted version of herself ever since. Lena was the one to bring the long-hidden parts of herself back out. God, she missed her.

"How was the beach?" Alex piped up after another little while.

Kara giggled, "Sandy."

"O-kay." The older Danvers sister replied with a subtle mock to her voice as she rounded out her "O" enthusiastically and rolled her eyes.

"We'll probably go back a lot more." Kara offered.

Alex took her time mulling over her next question. "You… talk to her yet?"

Kara knew what she meant. She pulled in a deep breath then and exhaled with some satisfaction. "Yesterday."

"Damn." Alex replied with a slight raise of her chin. "Timing's a hell of a thing, huh?"

"Yup."

It was very early when someone knocked at the door to come in and check on Eliza. Kara hadn't been able to get back to sleep since. Alex however was out cold, still wrapped tight like a papoose in her thin blanket. Her chair was reclined as far as it would go, and her knees and heels spanned the width of it as far as she could bend her legs. It looked incredibly uncomfortable.

Around eight o'clock that morning, Lena and Sam strolled through the door of the room with hot containers of breakfast. As soon as raven dark hair and red painted lips entered her vision, a massive weight fell from Kara's shoulders. Just having her near made being conscious bearable. Kara ached around her neck and shoulders and thought to ask Lena if she might rub them, but words were still so far out of reach that she resolved just to be thankful that the other woman had even persisted to come in the first place. The night before had been rough. The air in the room was cold, and everything around her felt hollow and sterile. Kara felt like she had awoken from the longest nightmare of her life just to find out that the nightmare itself bled into her reality and tormented her still.

With Sam unloading her arms of her bag and food next to Alex in the far corner of the room, Lena bent down to peck a quick kiss at Kara's temple. As a result, Kara's heart leapt in her chest and rushed the blood in her veins, reawakening every inch of her skin for a few, short seconds. It had been like a quick jolt of energy, one that sent a flush of heat across her cheekbones. Kara only knew that Lena was just being mindful and delicate of their public displays of affection. Not that Kara really felt the need to shield them from her sister, who least of all would even mention anything, but the fact that Lena still chose to tread softly with her affections when they weren't alone pleased Kara in a way that made her want to feel brave. She'd kiss her soon, and she wouldn't give a damn who saw.

"I brought you a bite to eat, since I doubt you had anything after Sam and I left last night." Lena said, offering the styrofoam container to the blonde with a warm and empathetic smile.

Alex piped up from across the small room and yawned. "I think I've smelled this hospital for too long because that smells an awful lot like Mama's buttermilk biscuits and gravy." She said as Sam handed her a matching container.

Kara went stiff, and her eyes darted to her sister across the room then. A small, sheepish smile spread thinly along her lips with an apologetic raise of her eyebrows.

"Kara…" Alex's head bobbed in astonishment as her eyes bounced back and forth between her wife and Lena. "So, you both know Mama's secret biscuit recipe now?"

The brunette nodded proudly, crossing her arms. "I helped Lena this morning. You were going to tell me eventually anyways." Sam said with a fanciful toss of her hair.

Lena was standing at Kara's side, doing her best to hide her smile behind tightly pursed lips.

"Besides—" Kara chimed in finally, "You try and see how easy it is to convince an actual genius to measure with her heart and not the 'proper measuring utensils'."

Alex nearly sputtered her coffee with a laugh and Sam merely agreed with a hum. "Mmhmm."

Lena just rolled her eyes in a playful gesture as she sat beside Kara with her breakfast. It appeared as though she was just glad to have Kara attempting some humor finally.

Whenever all four of them were together, more of Kara's innermost-self came out, bit by bit. These were some of the moments that Lena cherished the most, second to her most intimate and vulnerable hours spent with Kara. She so enjoyed witnessing the banter between the Danvers sisters, and how happy Sam was to be a part of it. Even Hank the surrogate father figure held a special place in this carefully knitted web of love and devotion. They were a close family, one which had curated a strong and impenetrable safety net all to guard Kara from the bigotry and small-mindedness that was known to run rampant in their tiny corner of the world. Lena could just tell by the way that people spoke to Kara and doted upon her, sometimes even needlessly, that they all shared the same manner of over-protectiveness.

It really does take a village…

Lena continued to admire the shared adorations in the form of teasing and general sibling ridicule as they finished their breakfast. Kara stopped every now and then to reach over at Eliza's hand on the bed just to squeeze it whenever something particularly funny was said, as if to garner her attention to it. As if to say, "Did you hear that, Mama?"

It wasn't long before a woman knocked on the door and came to fill in the family on the findings of Eliza's brain imaging. There had been cause for concern, and rightly so; Eliza's scans showed accelerated signs of dementia, which meant that she would need extra care and attention for the remainder of her life. That, and the fact that she had still not awakened from her head injury was not necessarily a death sentence. Alex's shoulders relaxed some with the latter half of the news, but now the family had a different issue altogether.

The neurologist ordered follow up scans to check the state of Eliza's brain and that someone would be by in a couple of days to address the adhesion of the previously excised cranial bone piece as it healed and grew back together with the rest of her skull. Kara's stomach had careened with that part, quickly making her turn a pale shade of green. She had birthed calf and foal alike and dressed many wounds in her life, but any time something had to do with bones, regardless of whether they were broken or not, the blonde turned into a puddle. A particularly bad break of her clavicle as a child after falling out of a tree managed to scar her in the bone-healing department forever.

With an absurd amount of prodding and pushing out of the door of the room, Sam finally managed to wear Alex down enough to drag herself and her sister away from the hospital for at least a few hours. Lena and Sam would stay with Eliza while the sisters made the trip out to Kara's house. She'd be needing a few changes of clothes at least for the days to come.

Alex was pushing herself in the bench seat swing on Kara's front porch with her heels as Kara exited the front of the house to join her. The rickety -smack- of the screen door back into its frame followed her as she continued toweling her hair dry. Both of them had showered, which helped to ease their nerves at least a little bit. Or so Kara had thought… Alex was wringing her hands tightly in her lap as she sat beside her.

"What are we gonna do, Kara?" Her sister asked quietly. Her voice panged with anxiety.

The blonde sighed. "Tell you what, let's save the catastrophizing and the disaster-izing for another day. Let's just... wait until Mama wakes up and then we can go from there."

"Yeah but what if she doesn't?" Alex replied quickly, her panic rising.

Kara merely placed a hand at her sister's knee and squeezed. "Stop." She pressed down to cease its anxious bouncing. "Do you wanna breathe with me?"

Alex looked at her in amazement, as if she recognized what Kara was doing. She should have. It was exactly what she used to do for Kara when they were kids. Alex nodded.

They silently counted through their breaths and held each other by the hand, their legs crossed on the swing. It anchored Kara to have such a safe and tactile relationship with her sister. What had once been a survival mechanism was now a call back to the heart of their bond. This was what felt more like coming home than anything else.

After she was satisfied that Alex had relaxed, Kara threw an arm over the back of the swing and leaned her head back with a long exhale. The sun was high in the cloudy blue sky above them and to Kara's delight, it warmed her skin with that gentle and familiar embrace. She turned the side of her face toward its rays and inhaled again deeply. For a moment, she managed to feel weightless and emptied her head of all her worries. A group of clouds rolled across the sun then, and back down to earth she came. Checking out was nice, but now it was either talk or be stuck with the hellish railroad of worried thoughts that barreled through her mind any time she found herself unbusy. So, she chose to talk.

"What did you think of breakfast?" Kara asked with a tinge of pride.

"Scary good." Alex's eyebrows raised as she turned her head to look at Kara. "That has to stay a secret from Mama, you know that right?"

Kara's heart dropped. Apparently talking wasn't much better than the runaway train of despair in her head. She felt exhausted all of the sudden.

"Sure, what's one more secret…" Kara said under her breath as her eyes fell to the wooden slats of the porch below their feet. She had no idea where the words came from, but somehow, they just fell out of her mouth, and she regretted them immediately. Kara whipped her head across to look at her sister, whose face was already morphed with guilt. "I'm sorry—" She began to apologize.

"No, you're right." Alex sighed heavily, hanging her head a bit. "No more of those. I promise." She reached over and took one of Kara's hands and squeezed three times.

I

Love

You

Kara returned three of her own gentle squeezes in acknowledgement. It was their pact ritual from childhood, which usually took the place of words when words simply weren't enough. The first time Kara had received it was the night that Alex swore a rather dramatic but completely believable oath to protect her from anyone who would hurt her after her first few weeks of living at the ranch. Her sister moved heaven and earth to keep that oath for years afterward. So, to Kara, these promise squeezes were serious business, even now into their adulthood.

Back at the hospital, Lena and Sam lounged in the somewhat uncomfortable reclining chairs of Eliza's recovery room. The Danvers matriarch in her bed had been wheeled back in after some time and the attending nurse agreed to share the results with Sam, who was by law recognized as a family member via her marriage to Alex. She had been told that things were looking much better than the day before, but they would have to wait to know more for sure after another neuro specialist could review the new scans and check back in with the family.

"I'll say it." Sam said with the wave of her hand after the nurse exited the room. "Kinda felt like someone took all the air out of my balloon there. I was fully prepared to argue."

"And I was fully prepared to have to talk you down." Lena replied with a chuckle. "Apart from the one lad who was gobsmacked when he realized Alex was a woman, no one seems to carry on about who you are."

Sam huffed a small laugh and shook her head. "She gets that a lot, some people just assume because of her name. I think it used to bother her in the academy, but she never really told me if other cadets were giving her shit or not. But Alex is tough. We're pretty happy here."

"Oh! G'wan! So Austin's been good to ya?" Lena asked with a happy tone.

The brunette nodded with a smile. "It's one of the more progressive cities in Texas, so yeah, we don't worry much. It's not like—" Sam stopped herself.

"…Like Alex and Kara's hometown?" Lena's voice became quiet again, as if she was slightly terrified that Eliza had somehow been eavesdropping on their more personal conversations that morning.

Sam grimaced slightly in agreement, and then they each fell silent. It was another long moment before Lena moved the book from her lap to a nearby table. She had been almost halfway through it from only having cracked it open when they arrived much earlier that morning… But she was growing a little stir-crazy from being in such a small space for so long. Lena stood then to raise her arms over her head and stretch a bit, and then began walking a quiet path alongside Eliza's bed. She was tired of those bland pea green walls but was determined to see this through with Kara no matter what. It's not like it caused her a great deal of suffering, to offer herself as a place of refuge for the woman she loved. She would suffer a great deal more for her but found peace with the fact that she knew Kara would never deign to give her cause to. She knew Kara to be the most well-meaning and kind-hearted person that she had ever known.

"So, technically, since you own those cute little rentals on the coast now…" Sam piped up behind her with a curious slant to her voice.

"Yes. Any time you want." Lena cut her off before she even had to ask. "But better hurry before that one takes over." She said with a laugh and pointed at Sam's slightly protruding pregnant belly.

Sam smiled wide and placed a hand on the underside of her very small bump. "True. I'll bring it up to Alex. But, now with Eliza… who can say."

Lena nodded solemnly. Then, all of the sudden, something grabbed at her wrist… but Sam was still on the other side of the room. Lena whipped her head in the direction of the hand that gripped her and followed the length of the arm that was attached to it. Eliza's eyes were open.

She was awake.