The Bet:
“You’re dating Lena?” Alex asks again, and Kara rolls her eyes with a huff.
“No! I mean yes, but not really,” Kara explains. Again. Gosh, what’s so hard to understand about this?
“What the hell, Kara? How did this even happen?” Alex scratches her eyebrow and blows out a long, slow breath, looking more exasperated by the minute.
“Well, Lena’s been coming over to my apartment a lot lately, you know-”
“Yeah, I know,” Alex mutters. “She spends more time there than at her penthouse.”
“Exactly her point,” Kara nods, continuing at Alex's glare of eternal impatience. “So, a few days ago, she asked if she was taking up too much of my time because she didn’t want to take advantage of my schedule if I was seeing anyone.”
Alex leans her elbows on the table in the Tower, pressing her pointer fingers to her lips as she listens.
“A-anyway,” Kara stammers, ever wary of that look. “I said I was kind of done with dating because I’m just not great at being a girlfriend, what with the two jobs and the risk to any potential partner’s life and all my… trauma or whatever.”
“Kara,” Alex interrupts, the sternness around her eyes melting into compassion as her voice grows soft. “You can still want someone. You still deserve to be loved like that.”
“That’s what – yeah, that’s what Lena said,” Kara admits, swallowing her disbelief and shaking her head, but she’s still as confused as she has been since this bet first started. “Lena said that I'd be a wonderful partner. That I deserve love because of who I am, not despite the things I see as flaws.”
“So you decided to date?”
“Not exactly?” Kara says, wincing as she hunches her shoulders.
Alex grumbles, rolling her eyes. “Of course it wouldn’t be that easy with you two.”
Kara crosses her arms and pouts. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing,” Alex mutters as if the answer is the most obvious thing in the world. “Just tell me what happened next.”
“I told Lena she was wrong and started to explain all the ways I’m a terrible partner, you know?” Kara lifts her hand to count off her points with her fingers. “Limited free time, occasional near-death experiences, breaking people’s noses if I get too excited while I kiss them, always running out on dates… the usual.
“But Lena disagreed—probably only because she hates being wrong—and said that she’d be the worst girlfriend between the two of us. Which is just ridiculous, and I told her as much, so we started arguing about who would be the most terrible girlfriend, and it got way out of hand.”
Alex presses her lips into a thin line, taking yet another calming breath. “No kidding.”
“Right?” Kara asks as she paces across from Alex, her cape swaying behind her. “Lena’s being totally unreasonable. Obviously, she’d be an amazing girlfriend, right? I mean, who wouldn’t want her?”
“Kara,” Alex utters her name like it’s an entire thesis, so Kara rushes to explain the rest before Alex can make her feel like any more of a goof.
“Anyway, Lena said the same thing about me—that I’d be an ideal partner and anyone would be lucky to have me. But I’m pretty sure this is one of those rare times Lena is disastrously wrong, and I wanted to prove it to her.”
“So you’re dating,” Alex deadpans.
“Well… yeah? I guess so.” Kara shrugs, her confused frown quirking up into a bashful grin as those clumsy, inexplicable butterflies start flapping around in her stomach again. “I said we’d date each other, and the last one to call it off is the winner.” Kara stops pacing, puts her hands on her hips, and beams at her sister. “It's a bet!”
It’s the perfect plan to prove Lena wrong—to prove that Lena is the best person in all the worlds to date.
Alex pinches the bridge of her nose, muttering something under her breath that sounds suspiciously like, ‘Jesus fucking Christ, Kara.”
-
The bet lasts longer than either Kara or Lena expect it to, and they each realize that… nothing changes.
Arguably, the bet never actually ends at all, but they both consider themselves the winner, and tell each other so as often as they can—including when they read their vows at their wedding :)
