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There was the crackle of comms; that was the first thing she heard.
“Goldie, updates?”
That’s Vic, she thought exhaustedly, mellowing in the blackness around her. It was so dark her eyes were doing that trick they did, where the blackness started turning into spots and whirls, the photoreceptors flooding open, as if in search of any photon willing to hit them. Maybe she was really seeing the stars through her eyelids, glued shut and gone transparent.
(This felt much more like death. If she’d really been dead before, everything should have been crimson.)
Vic sounded a million miles away.
(Maybe he was.)
A grunt, and a boom. “I found her,” a voice said. There was something breathless about the words, as if they were a struggle to get out. And strangely enough, hearing those words, Donna knew she was going to be fine.
Kory, her mind sluggishly provided her. That’s Kory.
“Donna?”
She strained to open her eyes, and there was Kory looming above her, like some kind of statue, limned from behind with a shock of stars scattered across the sky.
Donna didn’t recognize any of the constellations, no Pleiades, no Sirius, no Big or Little Dippers, couldn’t place where exactly she was. Not Earth. Not New Cronus. She hadn’t been on any other planets long enough to memorize the skies around them. (Being a goddess of the moon should have come with an instinctive intuition for which stars were where and where in the cosmos she'd landed. That it had not was a bit of a tragedy.) Not that it mattered much; Kory was here, and she would know how to get them home. She could always trust Kory to come and save her.
“Can you stand?” Kory asked, reaching down a hand. Her face was shrouded in shadow, but Donna would know her voice anywhere. She reached a hand up, trying to shake some of the grogginess from her mind. Kory clasped it in her own, and touching Kory was like getting an electric zap; it sang through the muscles of her arm and straight into her core and it shook off a lot of her remaining confusion.
Kory was looking down at her, eyes verdant and luminous in the darkness, soaking up the starlight.
Donna tugged on her arm and hauled herself upright, bracing herself for the inevitable headrush of dizziness that almost always accompanied being knocked out. She swayed on her feet as blackness encroached on her vision, and Kory reached out to steady her with her other hand. The warmth from it spread through Donna’s skin like it were honey.
A tiny drone circled around them, and shot a blast towards them; Kory spun, quickly, shooting out a starbolt of purple light, and the device dropped with a thunk to the ground with a puff of pewter dust. (Right. There had been some kind of inventor teamed up with a magician. It had been a Justice League mission.)
“Are you alright?” Her voice was melodious, like ambrosia to Donna’s ears.
“Yeah, sweetheart,” Donna said, blinking stars from her vision.
She took in a bit more of where they were; what looked like a barren moon, crater-pocked and dusty gray, the sky black with distant stars and one vibrant ultramarine nebula above them; far side of a moon, then. A spaceship a few yards away, the design tugging on some sort of familiar memory in the back of her mind.
“I got sent on the rescue mission,” Kory said matter-of-factly. “You got knocked through some sort of magical portal. Justice League fight, per Vic and Dick." (It came back; she'd been back to back with Batman; Dick had been shouting instructions at the rest of the team while she fended off attacks; she’d been able to command the specters attacking them with her lasso, which was surprising since the creatures barely seemed corporeal. And then there had been a blast aimed at Jennie Lynn. Her back was turned; she was concentrating on holding up a garage whose foundations the creatures had smashed through with several glowing green columns whilst Jesse did a scan for any bystanders. There had been no thought; she’d instinctively flown to block it.)
"Once they honed in on your location, I was already out here and by far the closest. We’re a couple systems away from Rann.” Dick and his contingencies. And of course Vic would drop everything to help.
Donna smiled at her weakly. “Thank you.”
Kory smiled back, teeth gleaming like pearls in the starlight.
“Is she okay?” Vic’s voice crackled over the comms.
“She’s okay,” Kory said.
“Dizzy, that’s all,” Donna said. “Tell Dick he can stop brooding, I’m fine, really. Little disoriented, that’s all.”
There was a sigh from the other end of the comms, and Kory smirked a bit as she lifted up the door to the ship.
“The rest of the team, they were okay? I don’t need to go find anyone else, do I?”
“Yes.” And there was Dick’s voice, crackly over however millions of miles there were between them. “Everyone else is okay, no worse for wear, and definitively on Earth.” He sounded exhausted, but she could hear the relief in his voice. “I’m just glad it wasn’t another portal to a different dimension.”
“Yeah,” Donna said. The unspoken part; Garth was no longer around to conjure portals to other universes anymore. (Maybe they’d never stop losing each other.)
“We’ll see you in no time, Donna,” Vic said warmly.
“I’ve got your lasso here for you, whenever you get back,” Dick added.
She smiled, despite the fact that Dick wouldn’t be able to see it.
“Ah, I could’ve used that. Hang onto it for me, Boy Wonder,” she said, ducking into the ship. Kory ducked in behind her, and pulled closed the door. “I’ll be back soon. Promise.”
Kory wrapped her in a tight hug from behind, and Donna relaxed in her grasp. She wasn’t going to panic, not when Kory seemed so fine with things.
“Holding you to that, Don,” Dick said, voice gruff in his best Batman imitation. She could hear the crack in his voice underneath, the tell-tale unshed tears. Kory’s hug grew just that little bit tighter, and she pressed a gentle kiss to the crown of her head. (She’d promised. She’d promised the universe she wouldn’t leave them again.)
“I’ll have her back to you all in no time,” Kory said confidently, letting go of Donna and sliding lithely into the captain’s chair. She pulled a lever and the ship rumbled to life, screens popping on in an array of blue and green. And Donna could finally properly see her face; washed out in the light of the array, the gold of her skin nearly silver in the electronic haze, soot and blood along her hairline on the side of her face she could see in profile.
“You’re-” Donna said, as Kory’s hand reached up to her comms and shut them off.
“They don’t have to know, do they?”
“What happened?” Donna asked, reaching a hand out to trace the contours of Kory’s temple, Kory’s face shimmery in the reflection on her bracelet. The blood was nearly dried, at least. They wouldn’t have to worry about bleeding.
“Nothing. The drone that was guarding you zapped me. You were in some sort of stasis field, when I found you. Some sort of remnant of the spell, perhaps. I did blast the drone back,” Kory said, a curl of satisfaction in her voice.
“The portal might have been from the engineer,” Donna said distractedly, briefly scanning the ship in vain for somewhere wipes might be hiding and deciding that foreign alien species did not, perhaps, stock transport ships with useful items for cleaning up from skirmishes. “LexCorp tech. You’re alright though?” Donna asked, hand tenderly reaching towards Kory’s temple again, and pausing halfway there, in the space between them.
“I’m fine, really, Donna,” Kory said, eyes sparkling. “Anyways, the fight did me good. I spent too much time just sitting in this ship.” Kory grinned, and Donna was hit with the full blast of it; Kory, in a spacesuit, the same opalescent lavender she was always sporting, eyes glittering like the stars speckling the sky above them, so perfectly tuned for the cosmos. When she’d fallen to earth, how had she ever dreamed that this woman could be terrestrial? No wonder the first thing she ever did was take photos of Kory pretending to be in space. The entirely of the cosmos belonged to her.
She buckled in methodically under Kory’s watchful stare, and watched, in turn, as Kory programmed the ship, turned various dials written in an alien language Donna couldn’t parse to revv the engine. (Who had Kory made contact with so she could?) She moved with such surety, and Donna couldn’t help but wonder how many times she’d done this before, how many times she’d used this particular ship.
She could still taste the jasmine of Kory’s lips, all these years later, from that time she’d kissed her when they’d been on Themyscira, so that Kory could speak with the rest of the Amazons. She hadn’t thought anything of it at the time, really; she could speak Themysciran again, and it would help if Kory could speak with her sisters, if she was going to be staying on the island. The softness of Kory’s lips, well, that wasn’t something she’d expected would keep revisiting her.
What was it like from Kory’s end, she sometimes wondered? A backwash of salt through the brain, changing the way her synapses fired instantaneously, so somehow the words that poured off Donna’s tongue so easily could suddenly, instantaneously pour off hers as well? What was that feeling like, to suddenly have clarity and understanding and for it to come from such a gesture of love? What a power Kory had, to be able to communicate.
And the words, pouring from some deep intrinsic part of her, bubbling up from a well she hadn’t realized she had. (It had taken death to find it again.)
(What was it about herself, that it took evil alternate universe versions of her killing her to grant her knowledge? Why could she not just get to know things? Why did her knowledge have to come with so much pain?)
Sometimes, she prayed Kory could teach her how to learn things the way she did, with so much joy, even when her education had been so miserably painful too.
Kory, like Paradise Island, had all of Aphrodite’s blessings. Kory, on a beach, lady dawn breaking above them, wrapped in a white tunic Donna had loaned her, a wreath of crushed pink petals placed on her head by one of the refugees on Themyscira, a clutch of violets in her lap, watching with fascination as Io worked in the forge, orange fiery sparks flying up from the sword she was welding. The two of them both refugees on Themyscira just as much as the others, no matter what titles they’d both been granted in the past.
Kory, later that day, flower crown sliding slightly off her hair, walking across the training island, staff in hand, watching the children parry haphazardly with wooden training swords and shields. They'd come to the training island since they were both itching for more than a basic hand-to-hand spar, and they wouldn't be able to their weapons anywhere else.
“We could do a demonstration for them,” Kory said teasingly, nudging the staff Donna also had in hand.
“You’re on,” Donna said, grinning, as they squared off in front of the children, who were quickly drawn in by the clack of their weapons. Kory spun like a storm, and her hits sent force jutting up Donna’s arms. It was as if she were a taut wire, all pent up energy waiting to be unleashed. There were wide-eyed oohs as Kory flipped Donna over on her back on the grass, staff held across her neck, wood pressing gently against her jugular. Kory's weight was balanced with one hand, her body pinning Donna's with a hairsbreadth between them. Her face was above her, and she was panting with exertion, though only the tiniest beads of sweat had appeared along her hairline, and for a moment, Donna was acutely aware of how close together they were; nearly close enough for Kory to kiss her again.
(It was nice having Kory back again. It was nice having someone else besides Diana who could trounce her.)
“Do the children speak Themysciran?” Kory asked, rolling off of her and reaching down a hand to help Donna up.
“Only a bit,” Donna said, watching as two children splintered off from the circle of onlookers and tumbled over each other. She picked the flower crown up from where it had fallen on the grass, several more petals crushed, and turned it over in her hands. “They’re quick learners, though.”
Kory nodded, then walked through the group, shaking hands with them, or touching them gently on the bare arm, and started speaking to each of them in their own language, a chorus of tongues so vast Donna wasn't sure she'd even be able to name all of them. And there was Kory, explaining to each eager child how to properly hold the practice weapon they’d picked up. She was struck with the sudden clarity that this was what Kory should have been doing on Tamaran, if there was still a Tamaran. All effervescent joy.
(How had Donna not realized it back then, that Kory herself was a revelation?)
(Or had she just been too terrified to admit it to herself?)
And then they were off, cutting into the sky, thrusters beneath them making the ship shake and jostle, and all Donna could do was gaze at the white stars outside the windshield, which felt like they were whispering for her, calling for her, as if the void were ready to swallow her whole again. She could see her own reflection frosted over it; eyes wide with purple bruises beneath, crescent earrings and suit glimmering, bruises up her shoulders from whatever her hardly remembered last fight had been nearly blending into the inky darkness outside.
She glanced over; Kory’s face was reflected too, better than in her bracelet, gold and wreathed in concentration, a little notch between her brows as she guided the ship out of orbit. Kory, who was so good at simply being that it made Donna nearly mad with longing sometimes; Kory, who had landed on Earth with so much certainty of who she was and what she was that nothing could possibly shake it. Kory, who ran around with so much joy, that it was practically infective. Kory, who could do nothing but love.
Sometimes, and Donna hated herself for it, sometimes she felt so small next to Kory; she, who couldn’t possibly compare, she, who had latched onto everything she was with the desperate fervor of the drowning. Those few extra inches to peer up into Kory's eyes. She was glad, desperately glad, that these feelings were only possible for the tiniest flashes; seconds of contemplation that she hated herself for afterwards. Because she loved Kory, more than almost anyone else she’d ever known. And she longed to have that same joy, to be someone that Kory showered her adoration on.
And here they were, zipping away from some unknown moon, and Kory had swooped in from the middle of space to save Donna once again.
(She was always saving her, wasn’t she?)
The problem, maybe, was she’d spent so long so desperately aching to be human.
And here she was again, eternity stretching in front of and behind her, and Kory inevitably by her side, as if she’d always belonged there. Kory, all gossamer feelings wrapped around a warrior’s heart, so desperately unafraid to love, and so very willing to drag others in her wake. And maybe she wanted more. Maybe it was too late, but she’d spent a whole lifetime trying to shove herself into a life. A life that the universe seemed to think she shouldn’t have ever lived, Monitors and murders arrayed against her. And she’d gotten back from that multiverse jaunt, and she’d seen what she could have been, and it almost killed her.
(Kory, poolside in California, looking at her coyly over her glasses, as if daring the universe to try and break her down again, all golden and shimmering and attempting mundane even if Donna knew that would never be enough to contain her.)
Kory turned, and smiled, and her chest throbbed, as if Kory’s smile could cleave her in two.
Kory, who would chase her across the universe.
Kory, for whom she’d always been real.
Kory, who sometimes she knew better than anyone, who was still sometimes so unintelligible it made her heart ache.
She used to think she wanted too much. A family, a white picket fence, a dream job. The universe hadn’t let her keep that. She’d abdicated that life, over and over and over. She’d lost to fate enough times. (Maybe she hadn’t been letting herself want enough.)
The universe and the stars outside watched them mutely.
(Maybe, maybe, this time, the risks would be worth it. What else could she possibly lose?)
The space between them was no more than three feet, practically close enough to bump elbows, and yet it felt like there were galaxies swirling between them. How could Donna ever possibly try to capture that?
She’d spent so long trying to escape the things she’d done wrong. Trying to make herself perfect. (Diana, a pillar; herself, nothing more than a fragile mirror copy, distorted.) She’d found her pleasure in honing herself for fights, in preparing for battle, in throwing punches; all the necessary bits of keeping people safe from the types of universe-ruining threats the Titans tended to face. And there was something satisfactory about it; she had her Amazon style fighting, and Kory had taught her some Okaaran moves over their many, many spars. If she was moving, if she was saving people, she'd never have to worry about looking in the rearview mirror. (Maybe, maybe, someday, she wouldn't fill guilty about filling Diana's boots on the JLA.)
But there were other things she’d lost along the way.
She’d been adrift from herself for so long, that she’d forgotten, maybe, what it had felt like to really, truly be in love. (No, that wasn’t true, and it wouldn't hold up to Diana's lasso at all. She’d forgotten what it felt like because she herself had been erased. She’d forgotten because she’d died.)
She’d been dead. She'd been summoned back to life. She’d seen the universe die and be born again. And yet she was still the same girl, somehow, even if her own continuity was not fully intact and punctuated with more holes than she'd ever be able to fill. She glanced at her reflection again, face pale, hair dappled with stars, the tiniest veneer of glass protecting her and Kory from the vacuum.
(What if she hadn't left that space near Rann the last time, and had died like she was supposed to, like all those bald pink Monitors she kept watch on now had said she had been predetermined to? What if she'd asked Kory to come fight and Kory hadn't actually made it home?)
She was the same nineteen year old who’d opened the door to Kory’s room, camera hanging from her neck, desperate to show her the prints she’d made up from their photo shoot. They’d turned out fantastic; Kory, green sunglasses perched on her nose, with all the confidence Donna had always wanted to exude coming to her effortlessly. Kory’s room in the Tower had felt like stepping into a greenhouse, if a greenhouse had been painted bright bubblegum pink; there was a dazzling array of green, slick waxy leaves shining with flashes of gold under the lights. And Kory in the middle of her own microcosm. She was seated on her bed, knees pulled up to her chest and chin resting on them. It was quite possibly the smallest Donna had ever seen her. “Kory?”
She looked up at Donna with teary eyes, but her face quickly brightened as Donna appeared.
She knew, looking at Kory, Kory who had been homesick on and off, that she would do anything to convince her stay. Stay with the Titans, stay on Earth. She didn’t know what she would do if Kory disappeared. The revelation felt frightening, but there was Kory, aching, and Donna couldn’t do anything but sink down onto the lime green covers of Kory’s bed next to her and pull her into a hug so that one of Kory’s round cheeks was leaning on her shoulder, her voluminous hair tickling her chin, the envelope of the developed prints entirely forgotten.
And out came pouring some of Kory’s grief, in fits and starts, a tale of romantic woe, a story that was clearly only brushing on half of her hurts, but Donna was not going to push too hard. Not with Kory.
“Donna, I wish I could be in love like you,” Kory admitted, morosely.
“No you don’t,” Donna said quietly, reaching for Kory’s hand, tracing the back of it tenderly. “I wish I could love like you. With as much fervor and as much kindness.”
Kory sniffled. “You’re just saying that to be nice.”
“No,” Donna said. “It’s the truth. Kory, you’re all heart. I wish I could be more like you.”
“Well, we’ll just have to keep being friends, then,” Kory said with another sniff. How had Donna ever lived without this girl in her life? “Maybe we’ll learn how to love like each other then.”
“Yes, perhaps,” Donna said, as if the words didn’t burn.
Sometimes she wondered what she had done to gain the favor of the muses and not the fates, that Kory’s ship had crash-landed for her to end up in her life.
Kory, that winter, snowflakes peppering her hair, a white scarf wrapped around her neck, a smile that could melt anyone’s heart as she saw snow for the first time, the easiest person she’d ever captured on camera, a revelation in the dim snowlight.
Kory, walking down a sunset-tinged sidewalk and parting the crowd, at once singular and at once the most natural thing Donna had ever captured on film, evening breeze tenderly caressing her curls.
Kory, perched on the side of a fire escape, in a pink dress and pink sunglasses, with eyes able to pierce the camera even between two sets of lenses, golden smile possibly the most beautiful expression of someone’s soul Donna had ever seen.
Every time she pulled one of the photos she'd developed out of the envelope she'd scribbled Kory's name on, it was as if she were taking a slice out of time, and there was Kory, as if she were reaching a hand through the ink to reassure Donna that all of it had been real.
There were photos that couldn’t get published, unless they were of Starfire. The late summer day she sat basking in the sun on Titans Island until she felt her eyes sleepily closing. And then Kory had tugged on her hand, waking her up, and had alighted. There was nothing quite like Kory, soaring through the air, arms spread wide like a dove’s wings, illuminated against the searing sky blue, looking utterly serene in a way she almost never did on the ground. She couldn't help but click the shutter.
She could luxuriate in being near Kory, in capturing Kory to save on film, for her entire life.
(Sometimes, she desperately wanted to photograph Kory in battle; that Kory, eyes burning, blasts of energy from her palms, all burning fury, in front of a storm of thunderclouds of the gray sort that looked like they’d been painted with a Renaissance artist’s brush on the sky; if she could bottle that version of Kory, if she could show the world that Kory too, the Kory who was like lightning unleashed in the name of justice. But she’d just have to settle for Kory Anders, the model, and her muse would have to manage with that.)
Sometimes, it was a wonder that she could capture Kory on film at all; it struck her like trying to photograph a fantasy.
(Maybe, maybe, that summer in San Diego had been a bit of a mistake. They’d been living practically on top of each other. Their lives had both imploded, and there was no Titans framework to hold things together. It was just them, and them turning back from their normal heroic pursuits, the world stopping around them.
And it was fun, watching Kory unwind in the Baker house, lounging in the California sun with all the insouciance of a cat, as if getting lost in space had given her permission to drop the weight of the world from her shoulders. And she’d decided San Diego was the place to do it, and Donna was the one to stop the world with.
Something about it felt different. Something about them felt different.
Maybe it was the same as it had always been. It wasn’t like they’d never lived together before. They’d been roommates multiple times and they’d lived in Titans bases together on and off. But they’d never tried for actual domesticity before, without the end of the world hanging over their heads. There was something different about watching Kory throw socks in a washing machine and chat with her while she did dishes. And there was skinny dipping together in the backyard pool in an indigo midnight, and bumping hips as they made up cocktails for the adults to drink on lazy Sunday evenings. Every other day trips to palm-fronded beaches, Donna pinning Kory's hair back and Kory doing the ties to her bathing suit. Because it was so easy and natural to fall into the same rhythm of things with Kory as she had back in Princeton. Easier, even, because Kory had always been able to read her every move like an open book.
The problem was the way she felt about Kory had, perhaps, been there from the first, and she’d just been blinded to it because she had had her boyfriend and she had always wanted to make the family she hadn’t had.
It wasn’t until that summer that she began to truly have an inkling. Her friendship with Kory had more warmth in it than her marriage had.
And maybe, maybe, she’d been blind. If the Titans had been that family all along, well. It went to venture that maybe, maybe, she’d been blind to her own feelings.
And then they'd both rejoined the team, and everything turned the normal pace of insane again and they all fell back into old currents, and Donna felt it was an impossible thing to ever broach again, as if the feeling would crest like a wave and then ebb away, lost to her forever.)
The ship turned, and Donna caught a glimpse of the moon they’d departed from, all glowing and bluish in the midnight black around it.
“Thank you,” Donna finally said, cracking the silence.
“You don’t have to thank me, Donna,” Kory said, lightly. “I know you’d do the same for me. You have done the same for me.”
“Of course,” Donna said, heart aching in her chest. How she adored this woman. “So, how is outer space treating you?”
Kory laughed. “It’s fine. It’s not Earth, but it’s good. I’m doing something good out here.”
Donna smiled. “I’m glad. You deserve to be happy.” All Kory deserved was joy. She’d had more than enough heartache to last multiple lifetimes.
“There’s a seat on the Justice League, if you ever do want to come back,” Donna offered. “Or Joey and Roy are trying to restart the Titans; you could join them, if you wanted to. But you know there’s always going to be a place for you. Always.”
Kory turned and smiled at her, and it was like getting hit with the full force of the sun. “Dick's letting you run recruitment, now? Maybe I will come back,” Kory said.
“Yeah?"
“Yes,” Kory said, dimples lit by the light reflecting from the moon. “I mean, you are there, are you not?”
“I am,” Donna said, smiling.
Kory sat there resplendent, as if she couldn’t just absorb solar energy, as though she were a celestial body unto herself, lunar rays illuminating her face in gold, as she turned to look back out at the void in front of them, the moon slowly fading away into oblivion.
“I was thinking about maybe moving out to San Francisco,” Donna said, as nonchalantly as she could.
“Oh?” Kory asked.
“Yeah,” Donna said, “I’d like to get back to my photography, and, well, Cassie and her new crop of Titans are out there, and it could be just as good a base as any. Florida didn’t exactly work, and New York feels...it’s not the same, not without you. And I miss California.”
Kory’s lips twitched.
“Are you...you enjoyed San Francisco?”
Kory shrugged. “Not that much.”
“Really? But I thought you liked California?”
“I do,” Kory said. “But you weren’t in San Francisco.”
Oh. Donna’s heart somersaulted.
(When Kory had been on Themyscira, Donna had inevitably brought her to the cliffs to go diving. They watched the water churn below, Kory with her toes hanging over the edge of the rocks, face contemplative.
“It’s a form of prayer,” Donna said, “to dive from up here. Diana taught me, when I was little.”
“I’m honored that you are showing me,” Kory said, sweet-voiced in a way that made Donna wonder if it wasn’t a shame Kory hadn’t landed on Themyscira with her spaceship instead of New York.
Donna had shucked her shoes already, and stood a few inches back, in the narrow strip of grass.
“I want to try it,” Kory said. And she was off, before Donna could say anything more; vaulting up into the air out over the water, fearless, spinning, then diving straight into it with all the grace she’d always possessed, the waves breaking around her.
“Okay,” Donna said quietly. “That was fast.” Of course Kory was the one who always leapt into action first.
She said a small prayer in her head, and followed, leaping off the precipice and using a little flight to align herself into a better dive.
The water was a shock of salt and cold and it was a thrill as she broke through it, to catch sight of Kory underneath, bubbles streaming from her mouth and nose, eyes wide and amazed, holding her arms wide as if she could encompass all of the sea.
She could drown right then and there, salt in her nose and mouth and the sight of Kory seared on her retinas, and she’d be happy.)
Maybe this time she needed to make the leap.
“You do know I love you,” Donna said, voice trembling.
“I know,” Kory said.
“No, I mean, yes," -a hundred days spent side by side, a hundred whispered conversations, Kory's giggles and her warm shoulder squeezes and all the furious warmth of nearly a decade of friendship-
"but, I think, last summer…that was wonderful, wasn’t it?”
“It was lovely,” Kory said. “I do miss it. Maybe not living as a houseguest of the Bakers, but it was...Donna, do you know what it’s like to watch you relax? You get this smile, and it’s dazzling.”
Her hand reached up towards her lips.
“I wish you were always that happy,” Kory said, in a voice so perfectly sincere Donna thought she might die.
She felt foolish even attempting to say anything else, but suddenly she was desperate to know. “Kory, that summer...was that...am I imagining things, or was that...were we more?”
Her and Kory, laying on their backs in the same queen bed in the Baker’s guest room, limbs tangled together, the space between them effaced as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
“Kory, I love you.” She sat there, feeling foolish, a hot feeling of shame starting to work it’s way up her neck, because there was no way what she’d just confessed was how Kory actually felt, not when she’d spent years on-and-off again with Dick, not when she’d decided to go right back into space after the Titans started splitting up again.
“Wait, you what?” Kory sputtered.
And she let go of the controls and spun her seat around fully to stare at Donna.
“Kory! The steering…” She wasn’t sure what exactly it was; controller or wheel or some strange combination of the two. It didn't matter, Kory should still probably have been holding it. “The steering!”
Kory raised an eyebrow. “I have it on autopilot. It’s not that different from the T-Jet.”
“Sure,” Donna said, wishing she had more oxygen than just what was available on the inside of this ship.
(It was Kory. Kory, who’d saved her a hundred times, who’d barrel-rolled midair with her in her arms, who’d jumped in front of all kinds of weapons to save Donna’s neck. If she had managed to make things between them unbearable-)
“Donna, how hard did you hit your head?”
Oh. This was agony. “I-I don’t think I hit it?”
“No?” Kory asked, a hint of incredulity in her voice. “You were blacked out, though.”
“I think that was whatever spell portaled me there,” Donna said.
“But...do you really?” Kory asked, looking more unsure than Donna had seen her in years.
“Of course,” Donna said.
“But you never…you never said anything. I always thought it was unspoken. I did not think...”
Donna laughed. “Did it need saying?”
Kory looked at her, open-mouthed. “Yes, it did. This is not some conversation you’re having because you’re not feeling well?” Donna shook her head no, and Kory looked wide-eyed out towards space. “X’hal,” she whispered. “Donna, do you...I’ve loved you for years. You know that, do you not?”
Donna shook her head, feeling lightheaded all over again. “You have?”
Kory laughed. “You were always with someone else. Or I was with someone else. And you never seemed interested.”
She could feel the walls of the ship pressing in on her.
“You’re out here, now,” Donna said softly, acutely aware of the three feet of space between their chairs, of Kory’s lips, the same lips that had called her name a thousand different ways, just out of reach. “And I was terrified, then, because if I ruined this...if I put words to it…Kory, you’re my best friend, and I-we just keep losing people." Kory looked at her, her gaze a cipher. "I see the way all of you still look at me sometimes, like I could disappear again." Outside stretched infinity, an infinity she knew the universe wasn't going to grant her, to grant any of them. She'd been to enough funerals with too-short times between hyphens to count on that. (The blackness felt just out of her reach.) "And I know I wouldn't be able to endure it if the same ever happened to you. And I don't have forever to figure things out, do I? I have a third chance, and that's more than I ever deserved, and maybe I don't-well, now, maybe I’m more afraid of not taking the leap. I know you’re happy and still I miss you.”
“There’s a spot on the JLA, is there not?” Kory said tenderly. “I wouldn’t mind going back to New York. You could use a model, couldn't you?”
Donna’s heart swelled. “A studio? Greenwich Village?”
“I think that would do,” Kory said, her expression so bright it was perhaps betraying the nonchalance of her tone.
“Big windows for your plants,” Donna said.
“And a spot for your darkroom,” Kory said, a half-smile playing on her face. “I’m imagining we’d only need one bed. Don’t you agree?”
Donna unbuckled her seatbelt.
A second later, there was an answering metallic click from Kory's seat.
“That kiss we had on Themyscira,” Donna asked, reaching out to grab Kory’s hand in hers. It felt like a furnace in her grip. “Can we do that again?"
Kory’s other hand slipped to cradle her neck. “If you're willing, I'd like to repeat that thousands of times. I thought you'd never want to ask." Donna held onto her, floating weightless between the seats. "Close your eyes,” Kory said.
Her lips, passing through a panoply of stars in the middle of the void, tasted like salt and night blooming jasmine and a lifetime of joy and so utterly right, and Donna swore she could see stars once again through the lids of her closed eyes.