763. Chapter 763

“She won’t be able to handle it,” Maggie warned, shifting her backpack from one shoulder to the other so she could hold her girlfriend’s hand.

“She can handle practically breaking the sound barrier, Mags. She’s tougher than she looks.” Alex melted at the contact, skipping a little down the hallway, because she still couldn’t believe that she had a girlfriend.

“Danvers, I love your kid sister, I do. But she still loses her shit over looking at birds. You really think she’s gonna be able to handle where you wanna take her?”

Alex stopped walking, nearly colliding into Lucy Lane, who was getting some massive politics textbook out of her locker. She still held Maggie’s hand, but she pouted – a move the little sister in question had gotten from her – and Maggie melted.

But Alex wanted to drive the point home even further, because, of course, Alex Danvers didn’t only win arguments on the quality of her pout (that was only… part of it).

“If she wants to have a shot at asking Lena Luthor to homecoming, it’s a risk we’ve gotta take.”

Maggie sighed, a smile forming behind her eyes as the bell rang for class. They both started speed walking to AP Bio.

“Alright. You know her better than I do. Let’s do it.”

They told Kara at lunch, and – predictably – she was confused before she was elated.

“But I thought bears were actual living organisms. So how can you build them?”

“Stuffed animals, Kar,” Alex explained, and Maggie nodded fervently beside her.

“Stuffed?!” Kara yelped, and Alex sent out a back the hell off shrug to the swarms of students who turned with mouths full to glance at the weird new kid.

“No, no, not… like… like Gertrude,” Alex murmured under her breath.

Kara’s eyes lit up at the mention of the old, worn wooly mammoth that Alex slept with every night.

“Aw, babe,” Maggie kissed her cheek, and Alex flushed with embarrassed joy.

“Yeah, well. Anyway. This afternoon? Maggie and I will take you?”

Kara’s eyes lit up. “Yeah! Thank you!”

But her eyes watered and her lip trembled when, after the 3 o’clock bell and their thirty minute Sexuality and Gender Alliance meeting, Kara walked into the Build A Bear workshop with her big sisters and saw bins full of deflated stuffed animal skins, limp and big-eyed and completely empty of the fuzzy insides that make them alive.

“No, no,” Alex saw Kara’s wobbling lips and understood instantly, immediately seeking to put a different spin in the mind of a sister that had survived when her whole planet had been gutted. “Kara, hey, they’re fine. This… this whole place is an incubator. Like, a nursery, and they’re all like embryos waiting to get fully formed.”

Kara’s eyes lit back up at that explanation, and her hesitation was replaced by eagerness.

She grabbed both Alex and Maggie by the hands – gently, gently, so gently – and tugged them toward the little creatures, waiting for be grown.

“Which one do you think Lena would like best? I think she’d like a bear, but they’re not unique enough for her. Like, she’d expect a bear. From Build a Bear. But does that mean I should get her a bear? Is there a social expectation here I haven’t learned about yet?”

Maggie stood on her tiptoes to sling her arm over Kara’s shoulders. “Only expectation is to put your heart into whatever you get her. Literally, look, you can put hearts in the little guys.”

Kara squealed with delight and Alex kissed her girlfriend’s cheek. Maggie blushed, and Alex preened.

“A dog,” Kara finally decided, tenderly selecting the one with one of its eyes off-center. “Because other people might not want to take him home, but he’s the most unique one, and Lena is the most unique human, so they’ll make a great match.”

She couldn’t decide what to record in the pup’s hand for her hopefully soon-to-be-maybe-girlfriend, so she settled on “hi Lena!” with Alex and Maggie silently giggling in the background.

She couldn’t decide on clothes, either, but while Alex stood with her sister debating the value of overalls versus a dinosaur hoodie versus a ballerina skirt versus, somehow, all of the above, Maggie snuck off to the side to make sure both the Danvers girls went home with build-a-pups of their own.

She’d been saving money for a big gift like this for months. She even had enough for a superhero costume for Kara’s and a basketball jersey for Alex’s.

“Look what we decided on, Maggie!” Kara turned to look for her joyously, Alex holding the dino hoodie and ballerina skirt up against Lena’s new puppy excitedly.

“Lena’s gonna love him,” Maggie beamed, cautiously holding her just-styled stuffies behind her.

Alex noticed; of course Alex noticed.

“Did you get something for yourself?” she lit up, because she was always trying to encourage her girlfriend to be as kind to herself as she was to others.

“Sort of,” Maggie grinned bashfully, grandly holding out the pups to their respective bipeds.

Alex’s lips were warm against Maggie’s mouth, and Kara’s squeals of delight filled the entire store.

So, too, did Lena’s, in homeroom the next morning. Normally reserved, cautious, careful, her unbridled delight when Kara held out the dino ballerina dog for her lit up the entire school.

Alex and Maggie, peeking into the classroom from the hallway, celebrated with kisses and small cheers, because a Super and a Luthor, bonding over a build-a-pup?

Perfection.