I'M KARA DANVERS

courage

Kara sighed glumly, sitting alone in the DEO break room. Her cheek was smooshed down against the back of her hand, which rested flat on the table, and she busied herself splitting open a packet's worth of individual M&M's against the acrylic surface with her fingertips. She had absolutely no intention of moving until a building was on fire, or an alien was rampaging across national city, or some other disaster of similar magnitude required her to fly in and save the day.

It took her almost a full thirty seconds to realise someone had sat down opposite her, her super hearing completely oblivious to the scrape of metal chair against floor. When she finally registered the presence of another human being, she blinked up to see Alex Danvers sat across from her, a concerned look etched across her face.

"What on Earth are you doing?"

"Just seeing if the meaning of life is hiding within one of these M&Ms." Kara crinkled her brow and focused her attention back on her work, crushing an orange M&M beneath her finger. "Nope. Just chocolate." Her voice was thick with apathy.

Alex grimaced and pinched at the bridge of her nose. "Jesus, Kara, this is bad. Was I like this when I was pining over Maggie? Never mind, I don't want to know." Alex shook her head decisively and reached out for her sister's hand, who pouted as she was cut off from her next candy victim. "Kara, I say this with nothing but love in my heart, but you need to get a grip."

Kara angled her head on the table to frown up at her sister. "She hates me, Alex. She hasn't called or so much as messaged me since I told her who I was. she clearly wants nothing to do with me—Kara Danvers or Supergirl." Kara sighed glumly and used her free hand to flick an M&M across the room, where it buried itself into the drywall with a neat crunch.

Alex slid her eyes from the break room's new wall feature back to Kara's hopeless face and sighed with exasperation. "You have a phone too, last time I checked. And what's stopping you from just flying over there? Don't tell me she put up a force field."

Kara huffed a laugh. "Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if she did." With what felt like monumental effort, she pushed herself up from the table and slumped down in her seat, withdrawing her hand from Alex's so she could twist at her fingers in her lap. "You didn't see the way she looked at me, Alex," she said quietly. The image had burned itself into the deepest corners of her mind: the hurt flashing in those inescapable green eyes, the smile stolen away from the soft lips Kara had come to know so well, replaced instead with harsh lines and a set jaw. Kara winced and shook her head of the memory, lifting her eyes to meet Alex's. "It was like she didn't even know me. Like I was a complete stranger."

"Kara..."

"I just—the thing is, she did know me. Does know me, because I let her. I wanted her to know me. Even though she really got to know me through Supergirl, I was never anything but myself with her. It was just so...easy. I can only say that about a handful of people."

"That's why you need to do something about it. If she means this much to you—which she clearly does—you can't just sit around waiting for something to happen. You need to fight for her."

"I have," Kara pouted stubbornly. "Winn and I have tried everything we could think of to track Lillian down, but it's just no use." Kara's fists balled in exasperation. The search for Lillian had turned up nothing but dead end after dead end, and Kara had watched helplessly as what she saw as her last chance slipped slowly away.

Alex's expression softened. Of course Kara believed that doing something like finding Lillian Luthor would be the solution to all her problems. Kara had always believed solutions could be found 'out there', in the real world, if you only searched hard enough. But Alex knew that when it came to matters of the heart, that wasn't always true. More often than not, the solution came from within.