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waytooinvested · 7 months ago

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Small Problem... Chapter 2

You can find the full story on AO3

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Lena was in the middle of grinding up a chunk of dried rhubarb for her latest spell to try and de-miniaturise Kara when Dreamer came hurtling into the room at full speed, almost running right into the far wall when she failed to slow down in time, and startling Lena so much that she dropped her pestle.

‘Nia! What is it? What’s happened?’

She would have been more worried by the sudden entrance, if not for the fact that Nia was now bouncing excitedly from foot to foot, and holding -something- behind her back like a child who had just raided the cookie jar.

‘Have you seen Kara anywhere? She’s not on the snack table’.

There was a tiny huff of air against Lena’s ear, and an indignant little voice muttered ‘I don’t spend that much time with the snacks!’

‘She doesn’t spend that much time with the snacks’.

Nia chuckled at the passed-on-message, tilting her head to peer past the fall of Lena’s hair to where Kara was sitting comfortably on her shoulder, legs dangling by her clavicle and one hand fisted in her shirt for balance.

‘I don’t know why I even asked – I should have known if you weren’t making the most of a fresh batch of crullers you’d be in here with Lena’.

‘There’s CRULLERS???’

Lena didn’t have to speak up for Kara this time, because that had come out at a volume loud enough to make her wince, and definitely loud enough to carry to Nia standing a few feet away.

‘Kara, remember what we said about shouting and proximity to people’s ears?’

‘Oops, sorry…’ Kara patted the lobe of Lena’s ear apologetically. ‘But crullers Lena! I haven’t had a giant cruller yet, and you know they’re my favourite!’

‘Well hang on, that’s not what I came here to tell you! I got you a surprise!’

Nia was bouncing again, and at last Kara was diverted from the promise of fresh doughnuts by her obvious excitement.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s- drum roll please-’

Nia stamped her feet in a rapid tattoo to simulate her own drum roll, then brought out the thing behind her back with a flourish, plonking it down in the middle of Lena’s grimoire so it would be right in Kara’s line of sight.

‘-YOU!’

The big (well, little) surprise was a miniature Supergirl action figure. Just under five inches high, complete with Supersuit, cape, boots and flowing waves of plastic hair. They all stared at it for a moment, and then Kara lifted gingerly off Lena’s shoulder and floated down to have a closer look.

It was not a perfect likeness by any means, but one of the better of its kind, and seeing the two of them side by side was… a little uncanny, honestly. Kara walked a slow circle around her doppelganger, taking in its fixed plastic grin and hands-on-hips pose with a perplexed frown on her face.

‘Thank… you?’

‘What’s she supposed to do with it?’

‘Isn’t it obvious?’

Kara and Lena looked at the doll, then at each other, then shrugged.

‘Not really?’

‘The clothes. You can take the supersuit off, I checked! Even the boots are proper leather. Well, pleather, but I think they’ll be comfy enough – they’re soft anyway, not stiff plastic, and they look about the right size’.

Kara perked up at that, keen to get back into something that would feel more like her usual self.

Once it had become clear that getting Kara back to her proper size wasn’t going to be a quick fix, they had done their best to get her properly outfitted. Alex and Kelly had taken Esme home to raid her doll box for anything that might come close to fitting Kara, and they had found a few things that worked, which Kara had been wearing on rotation. Her favourite so far had been a tiny pair of blue jean style stretchy pants, and a matching blue shirt with long sleeves layered under short that had once belonged to a Tiny Teen!TM doll. Her LEAST favourite was the ill fitting ‘sleepy bunnikins’ baby doll onesie she had been forced to wear for one humiliating afternoon while chocolate frosting was washed out of her other clothes after an incident of over-exuberance helping Esme decorate cupcakes for her upcoming birthday party. The rest fell somewhere between the two on the spectrum of acceptability, but none had made Kara feel entirely herself, and they had had no luck at all so far with shoes.

Until now.

‘YES! Thank you Nia!!! Lena, would you mind…?’

Kara gestured at the open grimoire and Lena obligingly stood it up on its end to hide her and the doll from their view, hoping that it wasn’t inadvertently insulting to her mother’s memory to use her revered magic book as a changing screen. She and Nia waited patiently for the reveal, sharing an amused glance at the mutters and grumbles that emerged from behind the book as Kara wrestled her plastic twin out of its clothes and pulled them on herself.

When at last she emerged the twee floral dress and pinafore she had borrowed from Esme’s littlest china doll was gone, and Kara was once more dressed in an approximation of her own clothes. She struck her familiar Supergirl pose, hands on hips, newly shod feet set wide apart, and looked hopefully up at them.

‘What do you think?’

Lena examined her tiny friend and nodded admiringly.

‘Much better. You look like yourself again’.

It was true, but not wholly true. The sizing was no worse than any of the other outfits she had been making do with lately to be fair – better if anything, since it was made of stretchy, forgiving material, but knowing how her suit was supposed to fit made it all the more obvious that the sleeves of this one were straining around Kara’s biceps, while the too-long pants wrinkled and the top hung loosely across her chest. Apparently the manufacturers had taken some liberties with Supergirl’s bra size…

Nia squealed and clapped her hands in delight. ‘I’m so glad I stayed up til 4am in an ebay bidding war for it, it was TOTALLY worth it!’

‘Nia, you didn’t!’

‘Yep – there’s loads of Supergirl dolls out there, but most of them are too big, or the clothes are just painted on. THIS one is a much sought after “Superhero In My Hand” model, and the clothes come off so that you can swap them out with other dolls in the series if you want to. I really wanted to get little Dreamer too, but that one still had another two hours on the auction and Brainy changed the wifi password to force me go to sleep, so my nemesis got her instead’.

Lena raised an eyebrow. ‘You have a nemesis?’

‘I do now. Ebay user Iheartdreamer98’.

Nia glared darkly at nothing in particular, then dropped to a crouch so that she was at eye level with Kara on the table, grinning again as if nothing had happened.

‘This is so cool. What do you think of the doll?’

‘I love the clothes, but the actual doll is a bit creepy, and they made me look kind of constipated. Now she’s out of the outfit I don’t think she really looks much like me at all’.

‘So you don’t want to keep her?’

‘Not especially’.

‘Can I have her then?’

Kara frowned. ‘What for?’

Glancing between Kara and Lena, Nia beckoned them both closer before whispering ‘hijinks’.

‘Go on…’ Kara whispered back conspiratorially (then had to repeat herself more loudly, because at her current size a whisper was inaudible unless she practically climbed into your ear canal).

‘Well -’. Nia reached over the grimoire to pull out the doll, which Lena noticed was now wearing Kara’s cast off frills (apparently despite thinking it didn’t look like her she had felt weird about leaving it entirely naked, even though it must have been a pain trying to dress a from-her-perspective-life-sized plastic dummy). ‘-Brainy knows I bought this because he was there when I was ordering it. But no one else does. Alex doesn’t. I thought there might be some good pranking potential in it. What do you think? Something to do while you’re stuck in here?’

Kara grinned back wickedly ‘oh yes’.

After the first couple of days spent getting used to her new size and taking part in a dozen different (failed) attempts at de-shrinking spells, Kara’s mood had shifted from distress to boredom. She couldn’t go to work. She couldn’t fly out to save the day from villains (though she had waged an hours long battle to oust a rat that had been attempting to set up home in the tower, then spent a further day amusing Esme with stories and re-enactments of her daring exploits). She couldn’t even go out without someone’s pocket to hide in, in case anyone saw her and decided to use her relative vulnerability to their advantage. In fact as Nia had alluded to, the main solace Kara had now was her continued delight in over-sized snacks, but even her appetite had its limits, and she was desperate for things to do. It seemed that Nia might just have found a neat solution to both her need for proper clothing and her need for entertainment (even if it was at the expense of her long-suffering sister).

‘You’re with us, right Lena?’

‘I’m theoretically with you. I won’t tell Alex what you’re up to or do anything to spoil your fun, but I don’t think I’ll have time to actively join in. I really need to keep working on this spell so you can get back to normal’.

Lena hadn’t been doing anything but working on spells since Kara’s accident, even though she had long since tried even the most tenuously promising charms in her mother’s book, and was more or less just making things up now. She was using rhubarb, because it was known for its speedy and extensive growth. Bamboo shoots for the same reason. A dose of her artificial yellow sunlight to boost Kara’s innate powers and lend the spell strength… she was about 48 hours away from suggesting that Kara drink up her milk and go to bed early in the hopes that it would help her grow up big and strong, or else poking about in rabbit holes to find the way down to Wonderland and the caterpillar’s magic size changing mushroom, but she couldn’t admit it.

Not when whatever had happened had to have been her fault. She and Kara had been standing over the workbench together at the time looking through her grimoire. Their hands had collided as they both reached to turn a page and Lena had felt the usual surge of butterflies that came with touching Kara unexpectedly. Then suddenly all hell had broken loose and everyone else had been thrown across the room while Kara shrank to dolls house proportions. It must have been some unforeseen magical accident linked to the surge of emotion, or the physical contact while touching the book, or… something. And if Lena’s magic had caused this, that meant it must also be able to fix it.

The trouble was that despite going over the interaction second by second in her mind every hour since it had happened, she still had no idea what she had done, or how. She hadn’t been trying to do a spell. Not just a shrinking spell, but any kind. The idea that magic could just burst out of her uncontrollably like that was terrifying, and another reason why she had been spending most of her time holed up in this room away from the others, where she couldn’t accidentally hurt anyone.

In fact the only person she hadn’t made excuses to stay away from for more than five minutes at a time lately was Kara.

Kara, who was the one Lena had most hurt with her accidental witchcraft, but also the only other person who was as trapped in the tower as Lena was until she learned to keep her magic under tighter control. It felt unfair to turn her away when she was already so lonely and overwhelmed by her new size. Besides, Lena harboured a secret, desperate hope that if they were together enough then whatever she had accidentally done might be undone the same way. They would brush knuckles in exactly the right place at exactly the right moment, or Kara would step onto some special part of the grimoire, and just as suddenly as she had shrunk, she would grow back to her usual size and this would all be over.

She didn’t say that to Kara of course – to her and to everyone else she remained optimistic, assuring them that they weren’t out of options yet, and the next spell might just be the one that would do the trick. Well then, the next. Or the one after that. She would find it eventually. She had to. So she couldn’t let herself get diverted into playing games with Nia and Kara, no matter how hopefully they were looking at her now. That would be like admitting she was giving up. And besides, somebody might get hurt.

Kara crossed the table to her and patted her knuckle gently, understanding something of her distress, even if not all of it.

‘I know you want to work this out Lena, but you’re allowed to take a break. It’s okay if it takes time. I’m okay’.

Lena smiled back at her gratefully, but shook her head.

‘I know, and I’ll take a break if I need to. I just want to do a little more work on this one first’.

‘Are you coming up for dinner at least? J’onn’s cooking something Martian-inspired’.

‘Sounds good, but I’m not really hungry. Save me some left overs?’

‘Sure…’

Kara still didn’t look happy, but she flew up from the table to perch on Nia’s shoulder, and Lena listened to the two of them talking about how best to prank the others with their look-alike Kara as they clattered off back down the hallway, leaving Lena alone with her spells.

Rhubarb.

Bamboo.

Artificial yellow sun.

There had to be a way.

#supercorp #kara danvers #lena luthor #Nia Nal #supergirl #my fic #supercorp fanfic #supergirl fanfiction #kara x lena #Small Problem...#It's official folks we have a second chapter of this utter nonsense #What can I say Tiny Kara is too much fun to write to leave it at one chapter #And yes being me I'm afraid I AM injecting just the tiniest hint of angst into the silliness #but just a teeny tiny bit I promise #miniature-Kara sized angst and she isn't even the one experiencing it #(Sorry Lena...)#There will be at least one more chapter to follow!#AO3 comments are always welcome and a good way to make yourself officially one of my favourite people #if that is something you have any interest in being

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