It was Alex's week to do the laundry, and of all the chores they rotated through, laundry was the one Alex hated the most. It used to be cooking, but her Mom had finally admitted defeat on that point years ago. She did all the cooking, because while Alex and Kara won't exactly starve if left to fend for themselves, neither of them will ever be anything close to a gourmet chef. So Eliza cooked, and Kara and Alex shared the other chores. Mowing the lawn, taking out the trash, washing the dishes, vacuuming, and laundry.

Most of them Alex didn't mind, but she hated laundry. She hated separating colors and whites, she hated soaking panties and pants in cold water to get out blood stains when her somewhat erratic period arrived without warning. She hated having to do a separate load for Kara's smocks so paint didn't ruin good clothes. But most of all, she hated having to check for charcoal, because there was always charcoal, and if there wasn't charcoal, there was graphite. Alex has lost count of how many hours she'd spent scrubbing out charcoal stains with a sponge, or graphite stains with a toothbrush.

It used to be an annoyance. Another weird thing Kara did. She always had a sketchbook and a drawing kit with her, wherever she went, and half the time when Alex looked at Kara, Kara would have the sketchbook open and be off in her own little world, sketching away. Alex never gave it much thought. It was a relief, in a way. When Kara was drawing, people mostly ignored her. Art nerds were pretty low on the priority list of people to pick on.

Since things changed between them though, it was something else. It was a mystery. Since things changed, the two of them shared almost everything. They ate together, they talked, they laughed, they cried, they watched movies. They were inseparable, except when Kara opened the sketchbook. When that happened, she got lost in a world of charcoal and graphite and wax paper and cheap hairspray. A world Alex was locked out of. Because Kara would share everything with her, even pot stickers, but not those sketch books.

So Alex hated laundry, because it was a reminder of the one thing Kara wouldn't share, of the one place Kara had forbidden Alex to go. She's not sure why it bothered her so much. They're just sketch books. Just stupid drawings.

Alex hated laundry because she hated a mystery, and those damn sketch books were a mystery. Alex used to think they were like Kara's paintings. Just memories of Krypton. But she figured out a long time ago that they weren't. Kara loved to show her the paintings of Krypton, and of her family. But the sketch books she guarded as if her life depended on it.

She didn't even let her art teachers see them. She had a dedicated sketch book for class, and Alex had seen that. Pages and pages of charcoal, graphite, pastels and watercolors, all skillfully rendered imagines of nice, safe subjects. Main street, Streaky, random classmates or teachers, bowls of fruit. Whatever the assignment was. All of them are technically proficient, but Alex had seen the art Kara was passionate about, and she knew the difference.

So every time she did the laundry, her mind lingered on those sketchbooks, and the mystery they represent. The hidden, closed off place inside of Kara that she'd never been allowed to see. And when she went back to their room, and she saw the shelf where Kara's old sketch books, the ones long since filled and tucked away were stacked, she felt like Eve in the garden, staring at the apples with a hunger nothing else could possibly satisfy.

She was good though. She never peaked, never gave in to the temptation. She loved Kara too much to cross that line. So she fell on her bed and she tried to think of something else. It used to be easier. She used to let her mind wander to Vickie and what they would do the next time Alex slept over, but since they fought, thinking of Vickie was more confusing than anything else.

Today was harder than most though, because a few minutes after she'd come in and lay down on her bed, Kara had opened her sketch book, and taken out a stick of charcoal and gone to work. Alex closed her eyes, and pretended to sleep, but she couldn't drift off. Not with the soft scrape of charcoal on paper in her ears, or the sound of Kara blending with her fingers, or the burn of curiosity and rejection filling her.

Eventually, she heard the soft hiss of the cheap hair spray Kara used to fix the charcoal and graphite on the page, and the stench of it made her wrinkle her nose. She opened her eyes and looked over at the bedside table where Kara always set the sketch book to dry, but just like always, Kara had propped it up so Alex couldn't see the page from her bed.

Alex closed her eyes, and a few minutes later, she finally drifted off to sleep, her last thought of how much she hated doing laundry.

The humans had a saying. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. It had confused Kara the first time she heard it, but later, once she understood it, it would echo in her mind. It was something uniquely human. A clever little commentary on the futility of wanting something which was beyond your reach. It also had a sort of casual cruelty to it, again, something uniquely human, in its disregard for the pain of unfulfilled longing.

Kara knew that pain intimately. Some days, she thought she knew it better than any human ever could, because the size of what she longed for was so much larger than anything a human could want. She longed for home. She longed for a family and culture and history and identity which had been wiped from the stars. She longed for foods she would never taste again. She longed for music that she would never hear again. She longed for places she would never be again. She longed for sights she would never see again.

But the cruelty of longing for that unimaginably vast collection of want that fit within the word 'Krypton' was not the biggest cruelty. Krypton was a past she missed, a past she had lived and loved but which was now forever out of sight and out of reach.

Far crueler was the longing for that which was within reach, within sight, only a hair's breadth away, and forever unattainable. Far crueler was the longing for the thing she loved most in all the universe, the gift Rao had given her to fill the hole in her heart left the day Krypton had been wiped from the stars. Far crueler was the longing for Alex.

Some days, she blamed Kal-El for it. His rudimentary grasp of their language, and his ignorance of their culture had led him to make a promise that would never be kept. Some days, she blamed herself for not learning the intricacies and nuances of human culture fast enough to stop a misunderstanding from turning into heartbreak. On her darkest days, she thought maybe it was Rao, punishing her for her weakness and failure. If she hadn't hesitated, if she hadn't stayed long enough for one last hug from her mother, then Kal-El would not have grown up without a teacher and a guide, and he never would have made so terrible a mistake.

It was, perhaps, the height of irony that the architect of her pain was also the source of her salvation. Kal-El's heavily accented Kryptonian was hardly enough for them to communicate at first. Both of them learned quickly, and while Kal-El had never really shaken the thick Kryptonopolis accent, he had gotten much, much better. But those first few rocky days, they had communicated almost as much by hastily drawn pictures as they had words. Kal-El had told Eliza that Kara had a gift for art, and Eliza had provided Kara with an endless stream of art supplies. Charcoal and graphite sticks, pastels and watercolors, colored pencils and markers, oils and acrylics and temperas, paper and card stock and canvas, but it was in the sketch books that Kara found the freedom to lay her want bare.

Book after book, month after month, year after year she filled them, chronicling Alex in charcoal and graphite with a photographic level of detail and accuracy. She changed only one detail when she committed Alex to the page over and over again, adding the bonding bracelet that Kal-El had unknowingly promised, but that Alex would never wear.

It was dangerous. Kara knew that. Eliza never pried, content to let Kara have a private space to put her feelings, but Alex looked at the sketch books with curious eyes. At first, it didn't matter. Kara was grieving for the bond no one knew she had lost, and she doubted anyone would understand the significance. If anyone found the sketches, Kara could just pretend that Alex was simply a convenient subject to draw. But as the number of sketches grew, that excuse wore thin, and when Jeremiah died, and Alex hated her, she knew it would be dismissed out of hand.

Now though, Kara wondered what she would do if Alex ever found out. Now that they were close, now that they were inseparable, there was a small, secret little part that wanted Alex to look, wanted her to see. It was Kara's silent rebellion. She'd given up Krypton, given up Kara Zor-El, because she had to, because Alex was too precious to lose. But in the pages of the sketch book, she could be her again. For a moment, she could be Kara Zor-El, and she could look at Alex, and she could say 'This is what I was promised. This is what I want. My friend, my partner, my home, my bond mate.'

When she finished a sketch, it was always the same. She took out the cheap hair spray, and she sprayed the page to fix the charcoal or graphite in its place, and then she sat the book aside for a few minutes to let the hairspray dry. And for just those few moments, she would dream of Alex seeing the page, and realizing what the bracelet meant. She would dream of Alex telling her that she wanted that too, that she wanted them to be bonded. Then, the hairspray would dry, and Kara would close the book, and set aside the dream until next time.