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“Are the candles really necessary?”
“They’re an important component of the ritual, Kara.” Lena replies, the deadpan quality to her voice more teasing than serious.
Kara glances around at the scene that surrounds her. The dim lights, drawn blinds, loose chill to the air — not to mention the upwards of probably thirty candles encircling her—she halfway expects a group of robed wizards to emerge from the shadows and start chanting or something. Or for a dragon to suddenly fly in through the tower window.
“It just feels a little bit like overkill to me.”
Lena grins. “If you’re getting warm on the floor down there, I can try and let some air in.”
Kara shakes her head. She’s a little warm, sure, but not from the candles. She’s been a little warm ever since Lena had invited her back here earlier, asking Kara if she would be willing to help her with a “project” after everyone had gone home from a long day of vigilante-ing. Kara, of course, desperate to spend time with Lena after she had been gone for so long, and willing to do anything to help her with whatever she had discovered in Newfoundland trying to learn about her mother. Kara owed her that much, but she also did it willingly. Because she knew wholeheartedly she would do anything for Lena.
Granted, she didn’t realize that meant lying down in the middle of a giant chalk rune circle during whatever Lena time had called “the witching hour”, acting as a test subject for one of her new spell experiments.
Oh well. The things we do for love, Kara supposes.
“Perhaps the candles are a bit excessive,” Lena mutters to herself as she paces the room, refocusing Kara’s attention. “I wonder if the smoke will interfere with the execution of the spell… like alchemy, the quality of the air may affect any transmutational properties— ”
“Hey, Lena,” Kara interrupts her rambling. “Take a deep breath, okay? You got this.”
Lena halts her pacing. She kneels down so she’s eye level with Kara—who, by the way, is still laying flat on the floor—and takes her hand. Kara ignores the slight tremor of Lena’s fingers as she squeezes the offered hand comfortingly.
“I know how important this is for you,” Kara tells her, gazing unfalteringly into Lena’s eyes in an effort to convey how much she trusts her, how much she believes in her. “I believe in you. You just have to trust yourself.”
Kara’s words are successful. Lena exhales a gentle sigh of relief, and a small smile grows slowly across her face, gradually unraveling the stress evident there before. For a brief moment, Kara thinks about magic—Lena rambles about transmutation, alchemy, the transitive properties— if magic is a transformation, Kara likes to think there is some magic in the way she transforms Lena’s anxieties into soft smiles.
“Thank you, Kara,” Lena tells her, voice whispering but strong. Lena removes her hand from Kara’s grip, and Kara tries not to yearn after the lost touch. She stands up from her kneeling position and claps her hands together, seemingly psyching herself up to begin. Lena continues the rest of her spell preparations confidently, explaining each process to Kara as she does so, then double, triple checks the runes in the circle before picking up her spellbook.
( Spellbook. Kara is still getting used to that.)
Lena steps up to her circle, standing just outside the barrier of chalk. Book in hand, she flips to a page closer to the front.
“So this is just a simple levitation spell,” Lena explains. “If all goes correctly, you should hover about a foot and a half off the ground and then hover back down to the floor after just a few moments.”
“And if all goes incorrectly?” Kara asks, allowing just the hint of her nervousness to peek through before he rolls it back in. “Not that I think it will, I mean—”
“Your turn to relax, darling.” Lena smirks at her. “If anything goes wrong I cut the circle and the spell ends. Easy as that.”
“Easy,” Kara breathes out. Easy. Okay.
“Are you ready?” Lena asks her, and Kara nods.
“Okay,” she whispers, placing the book on a table in front of her and thrusting out her hands. “Let’s begin.”
Lena starts to chant in a language Kara doesn't fully recognize, but from the sudden strength in Lena’s usually suppressed Irish accent, Kara assumes it to be Latin. As Lena begins the spell, a soft breeze wafts into their room in the tower despite all the windows and doors being shut—it causes the small flames of the candles to flicker momentarily before flowing lower, lifting the edges of the loose papers tucked away on the floor before rushing towards the circle Kara is currently back—down in. The breeze grows into a strong gale, whipping Kara’s hair and shit in all directions. She’s thankful she isn't wearing her glasses right now, because they would definitely be taken by the growing storm beneath her.
As the wind continues to gather around Kara, she feels the pressure between her back and floor lessen slightly, and before she even realizes, she’s being lifted five, ten inches, and then over a foot into the air, supported by the magical wind Lena has conjured in the space, then, just as slowly, the wind disperses until Kara is gently lowered back onto the floor where she had been lying before, and all the lit candles in the room suddenly extinguish themselves with a unified exhale of wind.
Kara bolts upright.
“Holy shit,” Lena whispers, then even louder, triumphant: “Holy shit!”
“You did it,” Kara whispers. Her mind is swimming in thoughts; her heart is pounding erratically in her chest, and not because of her previous nervousness about the spell. Right now, she looks at Lena, and all she feels is… pride. And love. Overwhelming, outpouring love.
Kara pushes herself to her feet and rushes Lena, tackling her in the tightest hug they’ve ever shared.
“I’m so proud of you,” she tells her, and Lena’s grip on the back of her shirt tightens. Then, because Kara can’t help herself: “Yer a wizard, Lena.”
The loud laugh that erupts from Lena makes it worth the shove Kara takes to the chest as they part.
—
After that, “magic training” with Lena becomes standard after a long day of protecting the city. When everyone else in the tower returns home to rest, Lena and Kara stick around to convert the training room of the tower into Lena’s private studio, pulling out the candles, components, and anything else Lena may need to build an appropriate “spellcasting ambiance”, whatever that means. Once the training room is properly set up, Lena will pull out her book and they’ll practice whatever spells they can—some of them more successful than others. The amount of times Lena has accidentally turned Kara blue by now might be worrying, but Kara doesn’t care—the look on Lena’s face when she successfully finishes a new spell outweighs all concerns about permanent issues with Kara’s skin pigmentation.
Today, Lena is trying a brand new spell that's slightly more complicated than the ones they’ve tried out before.
The complication?
Lena will also be casting the spell on herself, because the whole purpose of the spell is to bind the two subjects together.
(Kara isn’t totally sure what that means. To be honest, she isn’t totally sold that Lena knows what it means, either.)
It doesn’t really matter, though. Kara trusts Lena, and if experimenting with ambiguous binding spells will help her understand and practice her gift, then Kara is fully on board.
They take a familiar position. Kara is on her back on one of Lena’s freshly drawn runic circles, and Lena is kneeling beside her, spellbook pressed open to a messily scrawled page in front of her on the ground. This time, the room is sparsely lit at all— the only sources of light are the three candles shrouding Kara’s head and the single candle Lena is holding to illuminate the book.
Lena begins to chant again. The incantations this time are longer, more structured, but Lena’s voice grows more confident with each practice session and Kara can hear the change in her tone from now versus when they first began. It fills her with a heady ache of pride.
The few candles laid out begin to flicker wildly. Lena’s voice loudens, booming and echoing through the empty training room, and it grows louder even, forcing its way beyond the walls, outside the doors, into each crack and corner until it fills the space like flooding water. Kara shuts her eyes, tries not to flinch, but Lena’s voice carries so loudly, so supernaturally loud, that it overwhelms her. She fears the people of National City might hear it. It’s almost like her voice is playing on a speaker at full volume inside Kara’s mind, and right as she thinks her brain might burst from pressure, the candle Lena is holding suddenly extinguishes, and her chanting tapers out to a low hum.
Kara heaves in a ragged breath, and blindly, she reaches out for Lena’s hand. Lena grabs it immediately.
“Did it work?” Kara whispers into the sudden silence. “How do we know if it worked?”
“I don’t know,” Lena whispers back, voice quiet and shaky following the intensity of the ritual. “I didn’t understand the purpose of the spell. I just saw that it created a bond between two people, so I wanted to try it out with you. I didn’t even expect it to work.”
Kara’s eyes shoot open. “You don’t know what the spell does?”
Lena stares at her with a confused look. “What? Of course I do, why would I test out a spell I didn’t understand—”
“You just said you didn’t fully understand the spell’s purpose!”
“What? No I didn’t, I— ” Lena freezes, eyes suddenly growing wide. “I thought it.”
The hand gripping Kara’s squeezes tightly, then suddenly pulls back. Lena plays with her fingers nervously in her lap, and Kara pushes herself up so she’s sitting upright in front of her.
“So I can hear your thoughts.” Kara says aloud. Can she hear mine?
Yes.
Oh no, oh no, this is bad.
Lena raises an eyebrow at Kara.
“Why is it bad?” She asks, a familiar teasing smirk peeking out from her lips.
“Oh, um—” down, surface thoughts, down! “I think about food… a lot, and I don’t want you getting super hungry because I’m mentally projecting images of potstickers, you know?” Kara smiles nervously. Good save.
“Mmhm,” Lena hums. “Good save indeed, darling.”
Crap.
—
After both of them have returned home, long past sundown and well into the dark of night, Kara suddenly hears a voice cut through her never—ending stream of Disney songs (top-grade thought protection).
Hi Kara. Lena’s voice drawls, voice clear like a phone speaker pressed up inside the base of Kara’s skull. I’ve translated the remainder of the text in my book, and it seems like the effect of the ritual should wear off by the end of tonight as long as we don’t attempt to recast the spell.
That’s great! Kara projects her thoughts back. Sorry about the Disney hits radio for the last couple of hours, by the way.
Don’t worry about it, Lena responds, and even though Kara is only hearing a projection of her thoughts, she swears she hears the hint of a smile in Lena’s voice. And hey, once it wears off, you can stop hiding from me.
What? Hiding from you? Why would I be— Suddenly, Kara’s brain floods with images.
She sees the first time she and Lena met, from Lena’s perspective. Kara is slack jawed and smitten at first glance, enamored by Lena’s confidence and poise and need to do good. She sees every lunch date where Kara dipped her eyes to avoid the intensity of Lena’s gaze, the way her fingers twitch whenever Lena slid a hand close to hers. And she sees the way she looks at Lena when she returns from the Phantom Zone, eyes lidded and lowered, the way she leans forward without even realizing when they pull apart and always, always chases after Lena’s touch.
The images disappear, and Lena’s voice cuts through the buzzing in Kara’s skull from seeing her last secret laid out bare before her. Would any of those maybe be a reason for hiding your thoughts from me?
How long did you know? Kara just asks.
It was a more recent realization. Lena thinks. It was harder for me to see because I couldn't imagine that you… felt the same way as I did.
The same way— Kara freezes, before a nervous smile grows on her face. You feel the same way?
Why don’t you fly over so I can tell you in person?
Kara is out the window at the speed of light, at Lena’s apartment thirty seconds later, and whispering “I love you” on her lips, in her bed, within the hour.
—
“Hey Lena? Have you seen Kara around?”
Lena looks up from her spell book as she turns away from her newest experiment. “Sorry Alex, I haven’t seen her for a while. Maybe ask Nia?”
Alex takes one final look around the lab, then nods. “Yeah, alright, thanks.”
Lena waits for her to leave, then spins back arounds to her desk.
“You can come out now,” she teases, reaching a hand out underneath one of her organizing shelves for the green— yellow frog stashed under the papers there.
“Ribbit,” the frog croaks, eyes bugging wide. Lena reaches a thumb out towards it, and the frog pushes up into her fingertip, nudging it gently not unlike a dog asking for pets.
“Okay, okay, I’ll turn you back,” Lena laughs, shaking her head. “I still can't believe you set this as the spell break.”
The frog sits patiently as Lena leans forward. Right as she leans in, it’s eyes shut closed, and Lena presses a soft and very brief kiss to the frog's forehead. Suddenly in a puff of air, Kara is sitting before her on her desk.
“Hi darling,” Lena greets her, reaching out to grab her girlfriend’s hand. “How was that? Do you feel okay?”
“Mmm hmm,” Kara hums cutely, eyes still shut.
“Any strange cravings like last time?”
“Just one.”
“Oh?” Lena asks, already knowing where this is going. “For what?”
“I’m really craving another kiss.”
Lena laughs. “But I already gave you one!”
Kara gives her a very cute pout, and Lena’s already given up her argument. “It doesn’t count when I’m a frog.”
“Well then, get over here.” Lena leans forward, Kara’s eyes still closed, chin jutted out expectantly. She’s such a little shit , but so, so adorable, Lena giggles. She loves her so much.
“I’m so happy you’re a witch,” Kara whispers as she pulls away.
Lena pulls back and pushes a finger into Kara’s face. “I still don’t like that word.”
“Sorceress? Enchantress? I know it has a mostly negative connotation, but maybe you could reclaim crone —”
“Just shut up and kiss me, idiot.”