Kara & Clara

A sharp, drilling pain behind your eyes was the first thing to announce your return to consciousness. It was a familiar ache, the rancidity of aether-concussion throbbing in time with a heartbeat that felt too loud in your ears. You were horizontal, the surface beneath you unyieldingly hard and cool against your back.

"I had it under control!" Kara's voice, sharp and defensive, cut through the fog.

"Under control? Kara, they went down like a sack of bricks! That beam was less than a meter from their head!" Clara's reply was a low growl, tight with a fury that seemed to make the very air vibrate.

You cracked an eye open. The ceiling was a crystalline vault, refracting the soft, internal light of the Fortress into a thousand tiny rainbows. Your head swam.

"Well, it missed, didn't it? Stop being such a mother hen, Clari. It's not like you haven't done worse."

"That's different and you know it! I pull my punches. You... you get carried away."

"I get the job done!"

The voices were close. Pushing yourself up on one elbow, you saw them. Two Supergirls, standing in the middle of the vast chamber, locked in a standoff. Kara, in her supersuit, had an oversized jacket thrown over it, sleeves rolled up, a defiant smirk on her face. Clara, cape still billowing slightly, had her back to you, her shoulders rigid. The argument felt like it was gaining steam, a familiar cycle of their differing philosophies. Your head pounded, and the faint scrape of your own day-old stubble against the smooth crystal platform was an irritatingly loud sound in the sudden lull.

The smell gets there first.

Butter. Garlic. Something with eggs. Rich and warm in a way that doesn't belong to 8 AM, or to the square footage of Clara's studio, or to any version of a normal Saturday.

You are on your side. Something warm pressed against your back.

You roll over.

Clara is right there... mouth slightly open, hair absolutely destroyed, one arm flung across the pillow like she'd been dropped from a great height. The sleep shirt has ridden up to her hip. She breathes slow and even, unaware of the smell, the sounds, the gentle sizzle from somewhere past the foot of the bed.

The studio opens into the kitchen with no real division between them, just three steps before the counter. And standing at the stove, back turned, stirring a pan of something that definitely has garlic in it... is Kara.

Every inch of her.

Her hair falls loose down between her shoulder blades, a little wild at the ends. She hums something tuneless under her breath. She shifts her weight from one foot to the other, completely at home in a kitchen that isn't hers, naked as if it was only her in the moment, and flips whatever's in the pan with the casual authority of someone who has never once been embarrassed.

The mattress dips.

Clara makes a sound, not quite a word. A low, pained noise of someone whose body knows something is wrong before their brain catches up. Her eyes open. Grey. Immediate.

She looks at the kitchen.

"...Kara."

"Morning!" Kara doesn't turn around. "I used the last of your eggs. And your butter. And whatever that yellow thing in the back of the fridge was."

"That was cheese, and-" Clara is already out of the bed, sleep shirt landing somewhere at mid-thigh as she stands. "why are you naked in my kitchen..."

"I'm always naked in your kitchen."

"You're not.... that's not... " Clara's hand goes to her temple. "That's not a thing that happens!"

"It happens literally every time I stay over." Kara finally turns, just her chin, just enough to glance back with bright blue eyes and a smile that could power a small city. "You always say the same thing. 'Kara, put clothes on.' 'Kara, there are windows.' I tune it out around the second sentence."

Clara crosses 3 steps in one and grabs her cousin by the shoulder, trying to steer her away from the stove.

Kara doesn't move. She's made of the same material as the ground.

"Move."

"The eggs will burn."

"I don't care about the eggs"

"You'll care when you're hungry." Kara turns fully now, meeting her head-on, and the two of them are suddenly in each other's space in the way that only happens between people who have never once learned to account for each other's bodies, Clara grabbing at her arm, Kara not conceding an inch, and Clara's foot catches the edge of the stove mat and she goes sideways

Kara catches her.

Which is the wrong outcome.

Because now Clara's back is against the counter, Kara's arm is around her waist, Kara is still laughing, and Clara's leg is hooked somewhere it has no business being, and both of them have frozen in the kind of position that would, from a distance, look extremely deliberate.

The pan on the stove sizzles.

Kara looks down at their current arrangement. Then she looks at the bed. One brow goes up.

"...oh," Kara says, very pleasantly. "Hi... Missed me?..."

The Fortress doesn't care about anyone's comfort. Crystal formations push up through the floor at angles that make no architectural sense, a cold glow that has nothing to do with warmth and everything to do with function. The recovery suite is the one room where the geometry almost behaves, a shallow alcove carved smooth, a low surface that functions as a bed if you're willing to accept that it's made of pale blue mineral.

They set you down on it.

Or rather Kara set you down on it, after carrying you the last stretch with one arm, which she absolutely did not need to use two arms for, and which she made sure you noticed.

That was six minutes ago. The fight bruises are settling into their real shapes now, a sting along the ribs, something dull at the shoulder. The choreography of it... the public part, the performative clash over the Metropolis financial district that gave three news helicopters excellent footage had gone more or less to plan. Then Clara got the alert mid-fight. Something beyond the outer belt. Her expression did the thing it does, that flat narrowing, and she was gone in under four seconds without finishing her sentence.

Kara had watched her go.

Then she'd looked at you.

Then she'd scooped you up and flown here.

She's standing beside the crystal bed now in pale gold silk lingerie... a bralette, a high-cut brief, the red cape nowhere visible, barefoot on the Fortress floor with her blonde hair loose over one shoulder. She hadn't changed in front of you. The suit was simply gone when she came back into the room, and she offered no explanation for this. Her posture has the easy sprawl of someone who has been thinking about this exact situation for considerably longer than six minutes.

"So," Kara says, and there's a lot of weight packed into one syllable. "Clara picked up something on the outer belt. Distress beacon, probably Thanagarian, she'll investigate, she'll be thorough about it..." a small breath through the nose, "she'll be gone three hours minimum."

Her finger finds the line of your sternum. Traces down. Simple. Deliberate. She doesn't rush it.

"Which means," she continues, blue eyes holding yours without a flicker of apology, "it's just us. Yeap... just you and me"

The Neon Spoon wasn't the kind of place that tried too hard. Low pendant lights over each table, a jazz quartet tucked into the far corner doing something slow and unhurried with a standard they'd clearly played a thousand times. The place smelled like browned butter and good wine and the faint, honest musk of a kitchen that worked.

Their corner table had a half-eaten charcuterie board between them and two glasses of something red that Clara had ordered without looking at the menu. She'd been to this restaurant exactly once before, three years ago, the week after she'd given the ultimatum. She'd memorized it then. Every exit. Every sightline. Old habit.

Now she was memorizing him instead.

"it's been, I don't know." Her fingers turned the wine glass by its stem, slow quarter-rotations. "Good. Really good, actually."

The jazz trio behind her shifted into something that dipped lower, almost conspiratorial.

"Kara kept scheduling things." A small, wry exhale through her nose. "Team-ups she didn't need. Training drills. One time she physically landed on the roof while we were..." She stopped. Reset. "She means well. Probably."

Across the bistro, a couple two tables over were locked in their own private argument conducted entirely in whispers and loaded looks over a shared tiramisu. The woman gestured with her spoon. The man stared at the ceiling. Regular human drama, surging quietly under the restaurant's warm hum.

Clara watched them for exactly one second, then looked back.

"She's off-planet tonight." Her voice dropped, not theatrically, just practically, the way she dropped it when she was being careful. Her grey eyes didn't leave his face. "Some situation near... somewhere. She won't be back until morning."

The wine glass stopped rotating.

"My apartment is..." A small breath. The blush that had been sitting politely on her cheekbones spread south. "Empty."

She bit her lower lip. Not the practiced, performative version, the real one, the one she did when she was actually thinking about something and her body betrayed it. Her gaze didn't waver and didn't pretend to be anything other than what it was, direct and warm and faintly impatient, like a door left just barely open.

The ceiling of Clara's bedroom came first, its familiar crack running northeast toward the window and then the light, that profound particular gold of a Metropolis morning that came through curtains that were never quite thick enough.

Then the weight.

Clara was sitting on your chest.

Not sitting the way someone sits by accident. Sitting the way Clara does everything, with full commitment and zero apology, her bare thighs bracketing your ribcage, both of her hands laced around your wrists and pressing them into the pillow above your head like she'd decided that's where they lived now. Her hair was a disaster. There was a pink in her cheeks that she had never allowed anyone but you see it.

She was smiling.

You'd seen her smile before. This was different. This was the smile she usually only produced in total private, in the dark, when she thought you were already mostly asleep.

"Morning," she said. Just that, like it explained everything.

It explained nothing.

A pair of hands closed around your ankles.

Kara's face appeared from the foot of the bed with the energy of someone who had already been awake for two hours and spent them being smug about it. Her blonde hair fell in a loose curtain, and her grip on your legs was the casual grip of someone who benches cargo freighters for fun and has made peace with that.

"He's awake," she announced, to Clara, who was sitting directly on your chest.

"I can see that, Kara."

"Just confirming." Kara's smirk deepened. She tilted her head at you with something that was not quite innocent and not quite predatory but existed in the hasty no-man's-land between the two. "Hi. So.... Fun conversation this morning while you were sleeping."

Clara's grip on your wrists tightened a fraction. Not enough to hurt. Enough to remind.

"Kara told me something," Clara said. Her voice had found its usual even register but the pink hadn't left her face. "And we talked. For a while." A pause in which she clearly decided against elaborating on how long. "We came to an arrangement."

"A very reasonable one," Kara added from the foot of the bed. Her thumbs traced small circles against your ankles. "Which I came up with."

"Which we came up with together..."

"I came up with it and you improved it slightly-"

"Kara."

"...with your very good suggestions, yes, it was fully collaborative."

Clara exhaled through her nose in a way that was not quite a sigh and not quite a laugh and shifted her weight forward, her knees sliding further up the pillow on either side of his head. The warmth of her pussy came with her as she inched closer to your face.

Her eyes looked down at you. The smile hadn't moved.

"You don't get a vote," she said, affectionately, terribly. "We already decided."

Under you, Kara's hands slid up from your ankles to your calves. The grip had changed quality entirely.

"Well," Kara said. "Almost decided... only decision was what half which one of us was taking... I won the rock paper scissors match... like usual" Kara shrugged as she snickered when Clara gave out a short sigh before Clara finally closed the space between her hips and your lips