Being Nervous
National City California, United States, Earth (Prime) | Seaside Lofts
"Lee?" Kara calls.
Lena makes some sort of small noise, even she isn't sure what it sounded like.
There are seven types.
Lena finds it helps if she says it out loud when choosing, especially since no one bothered to just invent a hundred-sided dice rather than re-using the D10 shape.
"D4," she whispers. "D6, D8, D10, D12, D20, D100."
She pulls a bulk, plastic set of dice forward and taps each dice with her right index, then goes back with the left.
Seven.
Seven times seven is forty-nine.
Looking at the table she emptied her purse on, Lena thinks there might be five times that many dice here.
Too many to choose from. So she taps each dice seven times.
"Lee? Oh honey..."
Kara's somewhere very far away and yet there are two strong arms around her. Lips on the top of her head.
"Lena, are you?"
"It's not an episode," Lena finally grinds out. "With you, I haven't had one. Not since we started dating. Not truly, not with you going with me and waiting and making sure the doctors listen when I tell them about side effects."
Kara's grin is so bright, Lena could burn to a crisp in it.
"You help me," Lena mumbles. "More than you help anybody else."
"You matter more than anybody else."
Lena chuckles.
"Don't tell the human race that."
"Saved 'em five or six times. Gonna save you now," Kara grumbles.
Lena chuckles.
"I suppose I went and did the ritual because I'm just...well, coping. This brings back some pretty thick memories."
"Tell me," Kara growls, never removing her lips from Lena's scalp.
Lena tilts her head up so she can look at Kara. So she can remind herself that this woman is real, let alone hers.
"Last time I played was with Mercy. Getting back in the groove because I wanted to show Andrea how. The night before the MIT-Harvard mixer where I realized that Andrea betrayed me."
"And then Andrea didn't work out," Kara realizes. "And Mercy went bad and you couldn't help. You didn't get a chance to say goodbye before she died."
"Yes. I don't suppose Andrea's really a D&D type anymore anyway. Too busy fucking her way through the spoiled rich girls of the southern hemisphere."
"Do you still want to go?"
Kara's learned to ask, bless her. Not to assume that these lockups mean Lena wants out of the party, game night, fundraiser or walk around the park.
"Yes, Kara."
"OK. But no talking shop. We're going to relax. I don't care if the rice papers come back, that's Shepard's problem."
"Reapers."
"What? That..."
Kara groans.
"That sounds way more like an extinction-level threat. That makes a lot more sense than what Carm was saying. Stupid mean vampire. Want some help picking?"
Kara nods at the dice.
"Please. You do realize that for a nerd girl, this is basically like letting her buy you lingerie?"
Kara's wide-eyed, panicked face is just priceless. It lingers for a long time. Lena has to kiss the arm draped over her neck to reboot her wife.
"Liar."
"I'm hurt, Kara. I do not lie. Luthors lie. I'm a Luthor-Danvers so therefore, I am reformed. I don't lie. I sass."
"Yes, yes you certainly do. Hmm..."
Kara's hands fly across the table in a blur.
"Not those," Kara decides.
There's the sound of running water and then Lena sees the punishingly bright blue glare of heat vision in the corner of her eye. Her wife has a small, six-sided brick of what looks like tungsten in her hand. Her heat vision is snaking along the surface cutting neat lines. Latin numerals, then Kryptonian ones. She drops the metal in a flask of ice water where it sizzles and spits. Then picks up an eight-sided chunk.
Lena can only watch in awe.
-----
Lena huffs.
"So maybe not tungsten next time," she grumbles. She had to switch her purse for a backpack. Seven dice each multiplied by seven types is a heavy load when using metal half again as dense as lead.
"Eh," Kara chuckles. "They're your workout dice now."
The door latch turns with a crisp click and the hum after and the whiff of ozone signal the L-Corp and Kryptonian security system coming online.
"Shall we take the stairs?" Kara jokes.
"Mmm. For variety."
At one point, presumably, the elevator in Kara's building worked. Perhaps. If so, it was a century ago when this was still a grocer's warehouse, not university-facing apartments.
Now it would be a damn travesty if Lena were ever to have it repaired.
"Supergirl!" shrieks the boy from 4-C moments before he crashes into Kara's knees.
"Tal, you have to be nice to Lena, too. Good manners."
Lena kneels to speak to the child only to end up falling on her butt. She's never having been gladder for her relaxed status at L-Corp. In her office attire, she would have just shredded the skirt.
"You're silly!"
"It would appear I am!" she chortles. "Help me up."
"Milady," he jokes, offering his hand.
Kara watches, careful that Lena doesn't tip the six-year-old back with her.
"Very chivalrous, thank you."
"Every child on the block is going to be so polite they're ready to represent the good name of House El," she mutters.
"No," Kara muses. "Not ours. Ours are going to be trouble. I think that's a tradition in both of our families. We both were the odd ones. So they're going to be like their mommas."
"Ours?" Lena mumbles.
Kara's knuckle traces Lena's cheek.
"Ours, my little raven. Yours and mine."
Kara pulls Lena's hand from her hip and puts it to her own criminally hard, furrowed abs.
"Together."
She can't possibly be...
Except she could. Two-ovum fertilization might be fifty years past Earth's medicine, or five hundred. No one knows. Not even Lena herself, not with all the knowledge available to a motivated lesbian with bottomless pockets, an energetic ego, and a research staff of thousands to set upon pet projects. If any woman has the science or is owed the favors, it's Kara.
Lena is rifling through her memory for what sort of Kryptonite might hurt her wife enough to make her explain that little nugget without hurting any hypothetical babies when Kara spots her sister.
"Alex!"
Alex is leaning up against a hot-rod red Subaru.
Subtle...
Alex's hair has gray in it now. Half a lock, if that. Kelly has been good for Alex. No booze, vegan everything, plenty of exercise. Desk job. Couples yoga that maybe ends up involving actual yoga. Lena wouldn't know. They tried a few times and all Lena learned was that Kara's muscles flexing in sunlight rather quickly ruins her workout focus.
Two small humans are growing inside Kelly, now. Kara calls them 'gumdrops' and poor Kelly Olsen puts up with her. Lexia and James, named after lost siblings. Kelly's and Lena's. Babies who give Alex every reason to live rather than fling herself facefirst into whatever wants human dead.
Forty is the new thirty, CatCo says. It still looks good. Forty-one doesn't merely look good on Alex. It looks goddamned lethal on Alex.
The sisters Lena close and converse for a moment in some half-whispering, half-telepathic thing they do. Lena lets herself hang back. They don't lie to her, she trusts this. Kara only ever lied once if Lena really thinks about it and it was a big one. So big that she can't help but believe Kara now. Never again. No one as bright-eyed and eager as Kara could hold any lie in, even a white lie about Lena's hair. Not after the Big Lie about her identity.
"Wish I could come with," Alex laughs, hugging Kara. "Kelly's nervous about the virus that's running around. So is my guy at the CDC. Probably another lockdown this year. If they do..."
Kara nods.
"Anything like multiverse gates, portals, anything like that shuts first. So you have to be with your babies. You're missing so much fun, Ally!"
"You are way too excited about this," Alex complains, shoving her immovable sister playfully. "Kind of jealous."
"You've been to space," Kara teases.
"Space. Not deep space. Not another universe's deep space in the guts of an ancient civilization. With blue space women and dragons and vampires and witches."
"I know, right?" Kara crows, her blue eyes flashing with bottled-lightning mischief.
Alex shrugs.
"Sounds pretty gay, the group you're going with."
Lena laughs.
"Witches and vampires, yes," Lena agrees. "But are dragons queer culture? Discuss."
Kara claps her hands gleefully.
"Did you bring it?"
Alex rolls her eyes.
"Can't believe I'm saying this but yes, trunk."
Kara lifts the trunk. Inside is a Coluan-made bottle with a very angry, very nasty-looking severed head in it.
"Was he that ugly before?" Kara mutters. "Rao, maybe I shouldn't have cut it off..."
"Granny Goodness fucking was," Alex complains, shaking the still-healing right shoulder.
"How's the shoulder?" Lena asks.
"Improving. Whatever those nanites you guys managed to get out of Spheerical Industries research are magic, I tell you."
A young woman jogs by with the chirp of Hi, Kara! that forms a loud, bright cloud around Lena whenever she leaves home.
She's wearing the best-selling T-Shirt on Amazon currently.
Multiversal Championship Scoreboard
Darkseid: 0 National City: 1
Lena owns one for every day of the week. but she will go to her grave denying she founded a shell company merely to make celebratory shirts for her wife's victories.