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[waytooinvested]

Small Problem... Chapter 3

You can find the full story on AO3

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Lena woke abruptly from an unintended doze to find her cheek stuck to the pages of her grimoire (damn it, she REALLY had to start treating this book with more reverence), Kara standing on her out-flung wrist, and the rest of her friends gathered around her work bench in a loose semi circle.

She sat up slowly, careful not to move her Kara-arm too much to avoid knocking her over, but unwilling to remain in such a vulnerable position with everyone staring at her.

‘What is it, did something happen? Does the world need saving?’

‘No Lena, the world doesn’t need saving, but we’re worried that maybe you do’ Alex replied.

‘Lena, we’re all here because we love you, and we want to help you. It’s been five days now, and you’ve barely left this room. You’re hardly eating, you are apparently only sleeping when you crash out at your desk, and you aren’t talking to any of us. We all know how much you want to help Kara, but you need to let the rest of us help you.’

Lena blinked back at Kelly, trying to collect herself from the haze of sleep and her sudden awakening.

‘Why does it sound like you’re holding an intervention for me?’

‘Because we’re holding an intervention for you. Sorry Lena, but Alex and Kelly are right. You barely even laughed at the photos we took of Alex’s face when she realised she’d spent the last ten minutes talking to a doll. And it was a REALLY funny face. You need help.’

Alex tutted. ‘Alright, thank you Nia, lets not get off topic.’

‘Well it was’ Nia muttered back at Alex before putting her Serious Face back on and turning her full attention to Lena.

Lena looked around the semi circle at each of them, hoping to find someone on her side, but they all looked back with the same expression of sympathetic resolve, and she knew it was hopeless. She dropped her gaze to her best friend instead, still standing on her wrist in Supergirl stance.

‘Kara, surely you’re not part of this? You know why I have to keep working. I’m doing it for you.’

‘I know, but...’

Kara dropped the hands on hips pose and shuffled her feet awkwardly (which tickled, but she was getting used to it).

‘I’m sorry Lena. This is so difficult, but you’ve been here for me ever since this happened, and I need to be here for you now. You’re my best friend, and I love you, and you need me to tell you this: you need a shower.’

‘...oh.’

Thinking back, Lena actually wasn’t sure when she had last made it home to shower. Yesterday? The day before? Longer? The fact that she had to think about it probably meant Kara had a point, but a full intervention about it seemed excessive.

‘Okay… I will go and take a shower. Thank you all for telling me, I guess. I’ll be back in an hour or so.’

‘NO you won’t.’ Alex protested. ‘This is not about the shower, it’s everything. You need to sleep, and eat, and take a break, and then you need to join the rest of us so we can work on this together. We miss you.’

They all nodded and added their own words of encouragement, and it was too much for Lena. Did they think she wanted this? She was doing it for them. She made to fold her arms defensively across her chest, but couldn’t help feeling like the gesture lost some of its power when she could only do it with one arm lest she topple Kara. She compensated with a glower.

‘You must see that I can’t do that. I still don’t know what I did to shrink Kara. What if it happens to someone else? You need to keep away from me until I figure out how to control it!’

There was silence in the room as everyone stared at her, jaws hanging slack. Apparently they didn’t see. Had none of the rest of them put two and two together about what must have happened? Alex took a step towards her, reaching out a hand as if to lay it comfortingly on her arm until Lena shook her head adamantly. Touching might be dangerous.

‘Is that really what you’ve been thinking all this time? Lena, this wasn’t your fault, you didn’t cause this!’

‘Alex is right Lena. My calculations suggest a 96% certainty that the miniaturisation was caused at least in part by an external force. It may have interacted with your magic in some way, but there is a 78.3% probability that it was entirely unrelated to you. In any case, the likelihood of a causal relationship between you returning to physical proximity with the rest of the group and a similar incident occurring is barely 0.004%.’

‘You’re wrong.’

‘That is statistically extremely implausible.’

‘I’m with Brainy. I know a thing or two about magic Lena, and what you’re saying doesn’t follow the pattern of yours. You’ve had your powers under pretty tight control for months now, and even when you were just starting out nothing like this ever happened, so why would it come up all of a sudden with no provocation? It’s not even like you were in a really intense emotional state or anything.’

‘But I was. And I was touching Kara just when it happened, so-’

Shit, she hadn’t meant to say that, but Nia had pushed, and it just slipped out.

Nia gave her a quizzical look, and although she didn’t turn to look Lena could feel everyone else doing the same, the heat of so many gazes making her cheeks burn.

Don’t ask, please just let it drop and don’t ask…

‘How come? Were you and Kara having a very quiet fight?’

Trust Alex.

‘No, we-’

They had been standing hip to hip, leaning over the book and idly discussing what spell Lena might practise next. They reached a page about a draught that would give you courage to confess true feelings to the one you loved, and Lena had felt a spike of adrenaline just at the sight of it. She had reached too quickly to turn the page just as Kara had done the same thing, and their hands collided. Their eyes had met. The butterflies had surged. Kara had shrunk. Here they were.

‘We weren’t fighting.’

‘So what were you- oh.’

Kelly was looking at her with an expression that betrayed far too much understanding, and a moment later Alex looked from her wife to Lena and her eyes widened too.

‘Oh.’

Lena’s heart was pounding now and she wanted to bury her burning face in her hands, but her wrist was still pinned by Kara and her friends were between her and the door so she couldn’t just storm out of there without first awkwardly edging past everyone. She shook her head in frantic denial. It wasn’t meant to happen this way.

‘It wasn’t. You don’t- you’re just-’

‘Lena? What was the intense emotional state you felt while we were looking at your book?’

Kara spoke as softly as she could given the level of projection required to make herself heard at this distance, and Lena reluctantly dropped her eyes to meet her friend’s. She was pretty sure her cheeks were hot enough to boil a kettle by this point, and there was no way it didn’t show. Somehow the intensity of Kara’s expression was undiminished by her tiny size, and the butterflies – god, the traitorous, ill-timed butterflies – started dancing again.

She opened her mouth to reply, and found she couldn’t make a sound. Not like this. Not in front of everyone. She just couldn’t.

‘Okay, everyone out except Lena and Kara. They clearly need some time to talk.’

Kelly started herding the others to the door, and Lena was so grateful she could have kissed her, if she wasn’t too caught up with the thought of kissing Kara to have eyes for anyone else (and also Alex would probably have murdered her if she did, but that seemed like a lesser concern right now given that Lena was kind of hoping that someone would, just so that she wouldn’t have to deal with talking about her feelings). The door was halfway shut behind the last of them and Lena was steeling herself to look back down at Kara, when Nia suddenly popped her head back into the room.

‘For the record Lena: 1. I knew it and I am super happy for you, and 2. I still think you’re wrong about what happened because if that sort of strong feeling was going to cause accidental magic, I don’t think it would be to shrink Kara. It would have done something way horni-’

‘NIA! Leave them be!’

Nia rolled her eyes, but her head retreated back into the corridor and they heard the sound of her whisper-arguing with someone, then a door banged and Lena and Kara were properly alone.

‘That girl is becoming a menace. I remember when she was so sweet and shy…’

She was trying for levity to diffuse the moment, but Kara refused to be distracted, her eyes never leaving Lena’s face.

‘But was she right? Do you… have feelings for me?’

‘Kara, I’m not sure this is the right time to have this conversa-’

‘I’m in love with you Lena.’

‘What?’ Her voice was a cracked whisper, barely there past the lump in her throat, because she had to have misheard. This had to be a dream… didn’t it?

‘I’m in love with you. I didn’t really realise until I thought I’d lost you for good, and then when I finally got you back I couldn’t bear to risk what we had by pushing for more, so I never told you. But now here you are devoting everything to helping me like you always do, and you just had to go through that in front of everyone and it was kind of my fault for being part of the whole intervention thing instead of just talking to you privately, so it’s only fair that I’m the one who says it. I am in love with you. Completely, desperately in love with you. And I want to know if you love me too.’

Lena closed her eyes, and a tear spilled down her cheek. She wanted to pull Kara into a hug. She wanted to kiss her until she forgot the feel of anything except Kara’s lips and her body pressed against hers, until she forgot her own name. But she couldn’t do that now, so instead she whispered ‘yes.’

‘Yes, I love you. I’ve been in love with you for years.’

The slight weight on Lena’s wrist disappeared as Kara lifted into the air, then there was the soft brush of fabric against her face, and Kara was wiping away tears with her cape. She came closer still, wrapping her tiny arms as far as they could go around Lena’s cheek in the closest thing she could manage to a hug. Lena laughed shakily, bringing her own hand up to cover Kara very gently. It wasn’t what she had imagined. But it was more than she had dared to hope for.

When Lena went home for the much needed shower, meal and sleep, Kara came too. She didn’t actually come into the shower (that was very much a full-size-only activity, though one she hoped to experience in the not too distant future), but she was hovering outside the bathroom door when Lena emerged and immediately settled back onto her shoulder the moment the door opened, despite her still-wet hair (as it turned out Kara was better than a blow drier, and used a moderated burst of heat vision to dry it in seconds).

They ate together, talking of small things as if everything was still as it had been between them, then Lena gave in to her exhaustion and went to bed. She did her best to make a comfortable bed on the night stand for her tiny friend (girlfriend?), carefully arranging a small cushion as a mattress and the softest sweater she could find to form a makeshift blanket, but when she woke in the night it was to find that Kara had abandoned it and was instead burrowed against her neck, cocooned in her hair like she had made herself a nest. It would be a pain to brush out in the morning, but Lena didn’t care. She raised one hand to cup around Kara’s curled form, and drifted back off to sleep.

From then on, Kara rarely left Lena’s side.

They still worked on spell options, but Lena no longer locked herself away to do it. She discussed the possibility of building some sort of de-shrink-ray with Brainy. Talked about the nature of magic with Nia. Alien powers with J’onn and Alex and what species might have traits that could be helpful. And she talked about everything with Kara.

They still didn’t have an answer to what was causing Kara’s tiny size, but they had found another answer to a question neither of them had dared ask each other for years. And now they had, Lena knew that whatever had caused this didn’t stand a chance against her. Because there was no way in the universe she was going to let some random mystery malchance magic keep her from getting to kiss Kara Danvers full on the mouth.