Heart of Steel ~ Winn Schott

And the American Way

"Winn, we have to talk."

Winn stared at Kara, her suit framed perfectly in the black void of his still open window. She really did always have a certain cinematic tendency about her, he had always admired that, but was there really any point when they were alone? His apartment was getting cold.

She seemed to sense what he was thinking and turned behind her to shut the top half of the floor-to-ceiling window she'd flown through.

It seemed as though she'd finally cornered him. He really hadn't been trying to avoid her, but after they'd talked at CatCo, he'd realised that that was exactly what Kara thought he had been doing. He'd really just tried to take some time to figure out what to say.

What a fat bit of luck that had done him.

"Is this still about James and I hugging? Winn that was ages ago and I've already tried to apologise."

Winn stayed silent, trying his best to avoid the gaze he knew Kara had trained on the top of his head. Of course that wasn't what it was about, not really. Well, not Kara and James, just James.

"I miss you, Winn."

He looked up to meet her eyes and saw that they were surprisingly dry. Instead of making him feel more at ease however, it simply reminded him of all the mistakes he'd made that had led up to that exact moment.

"Kara, it wasn't your fault."

Winn paused.

Kara was watching him expectantly, clearly waiting for him to continue, but he wasn't sure where he should go. He'd sort of hoped that putting her at ease would be the end of that particular topic of conversation, but as it turned out all too often, he was quite wrong.

He wouldn't normally have been worried about how to explain himself because he and Kara... they got each other. More often than not, they were usually on the same page and it didn't require too much effort for her to understand what he was thinking, but that meant that when she had no clue what his next sentence was going to be, he had no way of putting it into words.

He quickly ran through the scenarios in his head, each playing out like a badly developed film reel, and soon came to the conclusion that there was only one way he could explain his actions.

"James likes Frankie."

Winn watched as Kara's face fell. Whatever she had been expecting him to say, it clearly hadn't been that. He could see the gears turning in her head as she too put the pieces together, just as he had when James told him in the cafe what felt like months ago.

Her expression shifted faster than he could keep track of, but Winn had known Kara well enough to note the tiniest hints of heartbreak echoed across her eyes before it was quickly masked.

"Well," she said, her voice cracking only slightly before she straightened up, feigning nonchalant-ness as though she was effectively fooling Winn. "I can assure you that James does not like me as well, so there's no problem."

Winn knew how painful it must have been for her just to admit that one thing, let alone how it must have felt for her to realise that her little sister was in the exact same position she wanted with all of her heart.

"I'm sorry, Kara."

"Winn, don't apologise."

Winn opened his mouth to say something else, but Kara stopped him.

"Just promise me that you won't tell Frankie?"

Winn bit back the question growing in the back of his throat and instead nodded, seeing Kara relax just slightly. She opened her arms wide and walked forward, wrapping him up tightly. The suit was not forgiving, but he didn't care and they stood like that for a while, enjoying the fact that there was nothing else around them other than the soft whirring of his ceiling fan and the guarantee that his mistake wasn't a problem anymore.