291. Chapter 291

She takes risks every day.

She throws herself in front of bullets – with or without the kevlar-lining in her suit – and she’s long since learned how to stitch her own body back together.

It’s a lesson one tends to learn on that island. On that boat. In the League.

She’s long since learned how to channel fear into a cocky strut and rage into spinning kicks and blood lust into herself.

She’s long since forgotten what safety feels like.

Because when your entire life is a risk – risk of death, risk of torture, risk of rapidly-building panic, constant drowning in self-loathing, that (you hope) no one but you can detect – when your entire life is a risk, you tend to forget what it feels like not to take one.

But then there’s Kara.

Supergirl.

She can’t quite remember, she can’t quite keep it straight in her head.

Well that’s a pun.

Can’t quite parse out how the girl with the glasses and awkward laugh and brilliant smile is also the bulletproof woman with the lowered voice and laser eyes and undefeatable stance.

Well, no.

No, that part, she can understand.

She can understand that part because when people look at Sara? When people look at Sara, they also see a helpless blonde with stars instead of the seven levels of hell in her eyes; until she starts to fight.

So she understands that part, actually: Kara and Supergirl. The contradictions, the agony of stitching them together, of keeping them apart.

Sara understands that because she lives it herself every day.

Except the flying. The flying part would be cool.

Maybe one day Kara will take her flying…

But no. No, she won’t, because she’s busy, now.

And not the kind of busy that they all are: busy saving lives, busy pretending they don’t need saving of their own, busy pretending their stitches will hold.

No.

No, now Kara is busy with some man who’s gotten in her head and won’t leave. Some man who tells her her loves her in the same breath that he that he tells her his mistakes are her fault.

Some man who’s worn her down and shattered the light in her eyes by replacing it with his own.

And that? That, Sara understands all too well, too.

But she wishes she didn’t.

“You approve of this guy for your sister?” she leans into Alex, elbows on the table, both their eyes fixed on Kara, laughing in the guy’s arms one second, scolding him harshly for something or other the next.

“Hell no.” Alex leans over quick as anything to grab Sara’s drink and chugs deeply, and Sara knows that type of swig, the desperation behind it. The need behind it. Knows it too well from her father, from her sister.

Her sister. Her stomach lurches.

She glances at Maggie, who nods grimly, confirming Sara’s fears about Alex, about alcohol, about need. Sara gently pries the glass out of Alex’s distracted fingers.

“Why don’t you stick to your club soda there, Danvers?” she suggests gently, and Maggie smiles gratefully, softly, sadly, at her.

Alex grunts and grumbles, but clearly she and Maggie have had this talk before, because she returns to her own, non-addictive, drink sullenly.

“No, I don’t approve of him. How could I? She’s screaming at him every day, do you know she told him explicitly not to tell anyone they’d slept together and he literally made a public announcement about it at her job not five minutes later?”

“And let’s not even go there with the guilt trips,” Maggie chimes, and Sara’s blood boils.

Because Sara’s life is one risk after another.

But visiting Earth 38 because Iris and Barry told her that Kara seems to be in trouble, that Kara seems to need an extra arsenal of help disentangling herself from this web he’s created around her?

It’s one of the scariest risks she’s taken.

Because she has to watch sisters who love each other. Has to watch one watch the other suffer with a smile, and she remembers that feeling, but god, at least Kara is alive for Alex to watch.

Laurel would’ve liked Kara. Laurel would’ve killed this guy. Laurel…

“You okay, Sara?” Alex interrupts her train of thought, and she shoots back the rest of her whiskey.

“You know it’s harder for Kara to listen to you and your girl because you’re her family, right? That happens sometimes.”

She thinks of Laurel. Of her father. Hell, of Ollie, Dig, Felicity. Snart.

She shudders slightly before rising steadily.

“Lucky for her, I’m not family.”

Alex and Maggie watch with excited trepidation as Sara stands, straightens her shoulders – even at full height she’ll come up to something like his chin, and Maggie grins because she knows that or his super strength won’t matter – and struts over to the pool table, where James is rubbing his forehead and Winn is trying his best to look anywhere but his best friend as she tells her off-again-he-insists-that-it’s-on-again boyfriend that, for the hundredth time, she hates when he touches her like that in public.

“You know what I love about this earth?” Sara cuts off Kara’s needed rant, and Kara whips around with a sliver of hope in her pained, furious eyes. “That it’s got men who will let a woman defend herself, but stick around in case she asks for backup, because you know what? She can. I know a few guys like that myself.”

She thinks of Mick and Snart and their first bar brawl together, the way that Leonard grinned at her when she asked him to hold her beer, the cocky confidence they’d had in her as they watched her fight off an entire bar’s worth of men more than twice her size.

She claps Winn and James on the shoulders and gives them both a soft, genuine smile before her eyes blaze again.

“But you know the thing I can’t understand? Why other guys just can’t seem to get the meaning of the word no.”

Kara licks her lips and starts to speak, but one look into Sara’s flashing eyes keeps her quiet. Because he won’t listen to her.

He won’t listen to her, and he won’t listen to Alex, and he won’t listen to Maggie.

He listened to Winn, but only for about a minute.

But maybe he’ll listen to a former member of the League of Assassins?

Kara dares to hope, and Sara dares to breathe, because it was lust at first sight with Supergirl, and it was I-wanna-get-to-know-you-because-god-I-could-probably-fall-in-love-with-the-light-in-your-darkness with Kara.

Her boyfriend straightens up and starts to speak, starts to rage, starts to twist words into weapons that will keep Kara his.

Sara winds up, rotates her hips, and decks him clean onto the ground before he gets the chance.

James oofs and Winn puts his hand over his mouth and Kara gapes and Sara stares down at him with fists on her hips and death in her voice.

“The lady told you she doesn’t like when you touch her like that in public. So you know what you’re gonna do, since you can’t seem to stop yourself? You’re gonna leave. Now. Because you think the DEO teaches you a lot of different ways to kill people? I can do it a lot slower than Alex Danvers can.”

“That… sounded dirty,” Winn mutters, and Sara tries her best not to smirk when James backhands him lightly on the arm as Maggie – coming over to stand behind Kara with Alex – snorts.

Kara’s boyfriend – ex, soon, Sara’s hoping, they’re all hoping, hell, Kara’s hoping – tries to object again, but Alex, Maggie, James, and Winn all turn to him with crossed arms and stony expressions. Kara’s lips part and she takes a step toward Sara, like she wants to collapse into her arms and just might if she lets herself.

“I’ve said it before, and I’m saying it again for the last time – it’s over. We’re over. We never should have even started. Sara’s right, just… just leave.”

Sara’s pulse quickens in her neck at the way Kara’s tongue wraps around her name, but she keeps her hands – and her thoughts, and her wants – to herself as she watches, as they all watch, the prince of Daxam stomp his disbelieving way out of the bar.

Brian applauds from a side-table, and Alex, Maggie, and Kara all call out at the same time.

“No one asked you, Brian.”

“Hush, Brian.”

“Don’t you have your own life to be living, Brian?”

Sara puts a tentative arm out toward Kara, and Kara leans into the touch. Maggie nudges Alex and Alex’s eyes fly wide, and Sara imagines a potential shovel talk in her near future.

She gulps, clears her throat imperceptibly, and forces words out of her throat.

“You okay?”

Kara takes a long, long moment of leaning back into Sara and reaching out for Alex’s hand to answer. “No. But I’ve got my family. So I will be.”

Sara swallows quietly and Maggie catches her eye with a smile. She knows exactly what the detective is thinking.

See? You’re family, after all. I didn’t expect it either. But isn’t it amazing?

And yes. Yes, it is.