Chapter Text
The delays are legitimate enough at first. After all, Cat tells Kara, one does not simply ignore a contractor’s suggestion that they could try to expedite things but would do a better job if they waited for some of the new copper pipes to be shipped in from their distributor. And after nearly a month, what’s an extra week or two?
They make good use of their extra time.
Kara seems determined to make a good impression on Carter, even though she is, in Cat’s estimation, Carter’s second-favorite person of all time (first, if family members are excluded). Each night, she’s careful to make time for him, whether it’s spending an extra half-hour after dinner talking to him about his day or working with him on his homework and brainstorming ideas for the science fair the school will put on the following month, and Carter grows more and more comfortable around Kara with every passing day.
Afterwards, though, Kara is all Cat’s.
Oh, they still talk and work on Kara’s reporting, of course. Now that Snapper has deemed Kara worthy of a real news story every now and then, Cat has been giving Kara notes on how to conduct interviews, how to store her notes, how to make sure she won’t end up trusting the wrong sources. But after that, after Carter is tucked into bed and the dishes have been put away, Kara no longer goes straight to the guest room. No, she tiptoes down the hallway to Cat’s bedroom, lingering in the doorway each night until Cat rolls her eyes and gives her a proper invitation in—“God, it’s like dating a vampire,” she’d remarked one night, which had turned into an awkward, stilted conversation about whether they’re actually dating.
Cat doesn’t think she’s done this much kissing since she was a teenager at boarding school. But Kara is just as thoughtful about this as she is about everything else, and each night she leaves Cat looking thoroughly disheveled, having been kissed within an inch of her life.
At this point, Cat’s fairly certain she’s averaging about 3 hours of sleep a night, but she also hasn’t felt this happy and energized in ages, so she won’t complain. Even if she’s not quite sure what she’ll do when Kara leaves and they return to seeing each other only once or twice a week—or whatever is defined as appropriate for such an early stage of dating these days.
Which is why she isn’t exactly annoyed when Carter tells Kara, on the eve of her impending departure, that she has to stay through the weekend because “I have that math placement test for next year you promised you’d help me study for.”
It’s important enough that neither of them think to question his reasoning, and it buys them a full five more days during which Kara makes up new math problems for Carter each night, and Cat makes several of Kara’s favorite meals, and Kara makes Cat come without even taking off her clothing. (The fact that Kara soars off as Supergirl before Cat can return the favor is decidedly unfair.)
On Monday night after the placement test, Kara picks up pizza from Carter’s favorite shop to celebrate.
“I don’t even know how I did yet,” he mumbles, even as he edges closer and closer toward the pizza.
“And? You tried your hardest, and you worked your butt off. That’s what we celebrate in this house.”
Kara freezes after she says it until Cat adds, “That’s right. And I can always call your principal and reminder her that standardized test scores are a horrendous measurement of student learning and potential if need be.”
He shakes his head, muttering something about “please don’t,” but he laughs a little as he says it and happily helps himself to three slices of pizza.
After dessert that night, Kara mentions that she’s going to check out the apartment the following evening and make sure it’s all ready before she flies her suitcases over.
A thousand excuses run through Cat’s mind, but Carter’s the one to insist, “We’ll go with you,” buying them both a little extra time.
And the next day, Carter is the one to point out that they’re still painting, shaking his head at Kara’s protests that it’s fine. “What if they see your suit?” he asks meaningfully, and Kara freezes.
“It’s a fair point, Kara.” Cat doesn’t question why her whole body seems to unclench at the perfectly reasonable excuse for Kara to stay through the end of the week, at least.
And then it’s the weekend, and Carter is back with his father again, and Kara seems to understand the gift they’ve been given in the form of a very empty apartment and hours upon hours of time together.
Cat overhears a hushed conversation with the sister about Supergirl duties and whatever organization she reports to not calling her for the night—and, oh, there’s a story there, Cat just knows it, but she figures if Supergirl can take a night off, maybe Cat Grant can, too. Besides, it’s not worth asking when Kara shows up in her bedroom doorway in nothing but boyshorts and the button-up she’d been wearing earlier.
That night, Cat doesn’t wait to extend an invitation.
Fisting Kara’s shirt in her hands, Cat drags her in for a heated kiss, throwing a leg around her waist and gasping at the feeling of strong arms lifting her up into the air and carrying her over to the bed without ever breaking the kiss.
The clothing comes off quickly. Cat’s pants go first. Then Kara’s shirt. Then Cat’s own, a few of the buttons now scattered across the floor.
All the perfectly defined muscles are, Cat will later concede, wholly expected on the Girl of Steel, yet in the moment all she can think is that she has been blessed with a literal goddess come to life in her bed, and she’s more than happy to worship her like she deserves.
Cat wants to spend all night seeing what it might take to leave Supergirl sated and exhausted. But Kara shakes her head, whispering, “Me first,” as she crawls between Cat’s legs, and really, how is Cat supposed to say no to an offer like that?
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Somewhere along the way, the excuses become a bit more tenuous.
On yet another Monday night when Kara’s bags are packed and stacked by the balcony door, a sulky Carter pushes green beans around his plate until Cat asks him what’s wrong.
“Kara and I had plans,” he says, a slight whine to his voice. “We were gonna work on my science fair project together.”
“It’s a whole month away, bud!” Kara insists.
“And? Kevin won last year, and his mom started working with him three whole months in advance! We’re already behind!”
Cat watches as Kara tries to diffuse the tension with easy jokes—things like, “Luckily I have superspeed,” and, “It’s alright, I’m from a planet that’s about a millennium ahead of yours in science, so you’re really not behind at all.”
The jokes do manage to pull smiles from Carter, who finally sighs and says, “I just…it’s fun having you here.”
And that more than anything is enough to have Kara hedging, promising to come over and help him as much as Cat will allow.
Of course, everyone who’s ever gotten particularly close to Cat—which is limited to about five people, two of whom are sitting at this table—know she’s a soft touch when it comes to Carter, so she has a ready-made excuse to tell Kara she’s welcome to simply stay in the guest room a bit longer if that would be easier.
If Cat happens to buy all of Kara’s favorite foods during that time and do her best to make sure Kara is much too happy and exhausted by the end of the night to even think about flying home, well…it’s fine. She enjoys having Kara around, yes. She likes having a second adult in the home. She loves seeing the way Carter lights up at having someone who seems to care for him almost as much as Cat does around all the time. And, yes, she enjoys their conversations just as much as the sex and doesn’t particularly want to sacrifice this level of closeness for the early stages of a dating game she feels too old to play. But they haven’t moved in together—not really. They’re not some lesbian cliché that Lois would use as fodder to tease her about for the rest of her life. It’s simply convenient. After all, Kara still has her own apartment, even if she doesn’t spend much (read: any) time there.
Still, it’s a pleasant surprise when Kara is the next one to find a reason to stay. At least, it’s pleasant until Kara quietly mentions, after they’ve celebrated Carter’s second-place science fair victory with ice cream sundaes and a weekend-long marathon game of Settlers of Catan, that she needs to stay with Cat because Leslie has escaped from prison and might come after her.
Two days off the electrical grid later, Leslie comes flashing through the screens at CatCo, apparently preferring to target Cat at work where she’s guaranteed instant coverage. After all the property destruction of Livewire’s last attack, Cat had special ordered surge protectors for all of the electronic devices in the office, and she keeps her fingers crossed that they work. The insurance company had been very firm in their insistence that they would not pay to replace every single monitor again. Ever again.
Luckily, Kara and a team of agents in all-black manage to contain Livewire much more quickly this time, and the threat to Cat’s life disappears with little fanfare. Kara still stays at the apartment through the weekend, though, determined to ensure that Cat is safe. No one says a word about it.
At a certain point, they all seem to realize there are no more legitimate reasons for Kara to need to stay in the penthouse another night.
It doesn’t stop them from turning to the decidedly ridiculous ones.
First, Carter remembers a game of Monopoly that they’d abandoned after tempers began running high that they absolutely must finish before Kara leaves.
Then Cat visits the apartment with Kara—mostly to christen every solid surface in it during one of Carter’s weekends with his father—and insists, only after, that the place feels musty. Neither of them points out that it’s probably from what has become three months of disuse. Instead Cat calls in a mold specialist who she instructs to be thorough, no matter how long it takes.
Later, during yet another dinner that is meant to be her last, Kara gasps in the midst of her chopsticks-turned-lightsabers duel with Carter, “Oh my gosh! I just remembered that your mom’s never seen Star Wars! Obviously we have to fix that.”
Carter opens his mouth to point out that, actually, his mom has watched all of them at least twice and even read some of the books with him back when he still got bedtime stories each night. Realizing his near mistake, he clamps his mouth shut again before smiling and nodding sagely. “Wow, there’s, like, a dozen of them. We’d better start soon!”
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It’s at some point during Kara’s fifth month with the Grants—after her first official game night hosted there but before Alex has come right out and demanded to know what Cat’s intentions are with Kara, even if Kara has insisted they’re still in the “early months of dating”—that Kara moves her things back to her apartment.
Mind you, she still heads back to Cat’s place that evening because Carter got an A- on his Romeo and Juliet paper that really ought to be celebrated, and they still have new Great British Bake-Off episodes that Kara made them swear they wouldn’t watch without her. Then Cat gives her a kiss goodbye that makes Kara’s toes curl, and she couldn’t just leave after that, now could she?
Still, she manages a handful of nights at her old apartment. Sister nights still happen there because tradition, and also Kara doesn’t want Alex grilling her about her relationship with Cat in front of Cat and Carter. Every so often she sleeps in her old bed, which feels so much less comfortable now than it used to, just to prove to Cat and herself that they can do a night apart any time they want. Kara also takes to going back to her apartment to clean up on nights when she winds up covered in soot or dirt or alien substances better left outside of the penthouse. And she crashes there when Supergirl fights keep her out into the early hours of the morning—at least until Cat mentions she gets nervous not knowing whether or not Kara is okay after watching her on the news. Then Kara starts making stopovers at Cat’s place first to show her that she’s safe and sound, at which point it really doesn’t make sense to go back to her apartment for a couple of hours of sleep.
By the end of the year, Kara has spent, perhaps, a couple dozen nights in her own apartment.
Alex buys her an anniversary card and a $50 U-Haul giftcard. Inside the card she writes little more than: “Happy anniversary to the only two women who haven’t admitted they’re living together yet! Stop paying rent on your empty apartment.”
Carter buys her a lightsaber keychain for the keys she now has not only to the penthouse, but also to Cat’s beach house and the “family-friendly” SUV that Cat insisted on giving Kara a key to in case of any future emergencies that might require Kara to pick Carter up from school because “I will not have Supergirl swooping in and putting a target on my son’s back, no matter how cool he thinks it would make him.”
Kara takes Cat out to dinner that night, and Cat buys a second nightstand to match her own, sets it up on Kara’s unofficial side of the bed, carefully stacks the handful of novels and the spare pair of glasses that Kara has left at the penthouse over the months on the corner of it.
“Are we…are we just living together here?” Kara asks finally.
“I think that’s up to you, dear. You have keys to both of my homes, and you’ve not once been turned away from my balcony.”
“But are you…are you ready for the press and the possible danger that would come with living with Supergirl?”
Cat arches an eyebrow. “Do you really not know?”
“Know what?”
With a huff, Cat pulls out her phone and, after a moment of typing, hands it over to Kara. In all-caps, a tabloid site headline screams out, “NATIONAL CITY’S RESIDENT HERO SHACKS UP WITH MEDIA MOGUL CAT GRANT.”
“I had no idea. But if you don’t want this—I mean, I could understand why you wouldn’t, and I can get used to my bed again, I swear. We could deny it, or—”
“Kara, that headline is almost a year old. They pretended to be shocked. Then they loved us. By now, we’re old news.”
“Oh.” Kara blinks. “Well…we can’t disappoint our fans.”
“Mm, yes, that’s the reason you’re staying,” Cat hums.
Grinning, Kara sweeps Cat into her arms. “Or is it because Carter needs a live-in tutor? Or you just happened to buy my favorite cookies and can’t have them lying around the house?”
Cat fixes her with a half-hearted glare. “Perhaps it’s because you need to make sure I don’t watch a single episode of television without you.”
“The first watch together is a very important experience,” Kara insists, pulling Cat in for a soft kiss.
“We’ll tell Carter the news in the morning. I’m fairly certain he and your sister have an ice cream bet riding on when we’ll figure it out.”
“So long as he gives us a cut of the winnings…”