Chapter Text
No longing for the moonlight,
No longing for the sun.
No longer will I curse the bad I’ve done.
If there’s a time when your feeling’s gone,
I wanna feel it.
i.
John lasts a grand total of three weeks before the Machine decides to intervene. Turns out he has a hard time running numbers without an official cover, and J’onn’s reaction to news reports of a Manhattan urban legend suddenly making appearances in his city?
Well. He doesn’t exactly use is inside voice.
Reese agrees it’s for the best that the Man in the Suit hang up his ski mask for good and pick up a badge again instead, so She sets up a transfer for John Hawke of the NYPD’s fledgeling Extranormal Crimes Unit to National City as head of a new bicoastal joint task force to combat Project Cadmus.
After Samaritan, finally settling back into a real cover with a job and a sense of normalcy and rules—it’s more of a relief than anything. In fact, it’s not much of a sacrifice at all, in the end. Especially not when a new human masked vigilante begins to make a name for himself in the city.
(John’s always been partial to suits of the tailored variety, but there’s something to be said for a gleaming suit of armor and a shield. He smirks a little when Winn and James try to pretend they’re not up to anything—they’re not exactly subtle, and when John watches them craft their first aliases, crackling with excitement at the thought of living double lives and fighting the good fight, all he can think of is how painfully young they seem. But there was a time when John might have gone for the classic knight-in-shining-armor look, too.)
//
After his second day on the job at the NCPD, he finds Alex back at the DEO and sidles up to her looking positively gleeful.
Alex didn’t even know his facial muscles were capable of forming an expression like that.
They stand there in silence until she sighs and turns to him, raising her eyebrows expectantly. “Well? Something you want to share with the whole class, John?”
“So I met a friend of yours today,” John drawls.
Alex freezes.
“Sawyer, huh? Detective Maggie Sawyer? You’re right, she is damn good at her job.” The tips of his ears are practically glowing red as he tries to suppress a grin. “You never mentioned how pretty she was.”
She scoffs unconvincingly, then sputters for a moment before snapping her jaw shut and forcefully clearing her throat.
“Is she? Huh. Hadn’t noticed. Well. I gotta g—”
The words barely make it out of her mouth before she gestures vaguely, turning on her heel to make a beeline for the nearest exit.
“Go, yeah.” John laughs under his breath. “You gotta go.”
ii.
They’ve been sleeping together for about a month before Maggie finally meets the rest of Team Machine. Even then, it’s entirely by accident and in spite of Alex’s best efforts.
Maggie ends up with a nasty head lac after a scuffle with a bicephalous reptilian-looking alien goes south. As it turns out, he was more terrified than hostile, and Maggie’s able to talk him down. (She’d crossed paths with some others of his kind a while back, and she has a gift for tongues. Apparently.)
Maggie talks him down; Maggie diffuses the situation more smoothly than Alex could have ever thought possible; Maggie leaves the scene with a new CI instead of a perp in cuffs.
Maggie completes the mission with an unfaltering megawatt smile and Maggie saves the day, but Maggie has blood tinged with a sickly green pus dripping from above her eye—and Alex panics.
She pulls Kara aside, even as the rest of Sawyer’s team is still congratulating her on a job well done.
“Get her out of here, Supergirl.”
“What- she’s fine, Alex. She said she’s just gonna hitch a ride back to HQ with the DEO van for debrief.”
“Now, Kara,” Alex whispers, voice low and clipped in a way that suddenly has Kara’s full attention.
You need to fly her back immediately, Alex wants to say, but the words are stuck in her throat. Because alien neurotoxins and a potential concussion and the fact that I said so and—
“Okay.” Kara nods softly and gives her sister’s arm a gentle squeeze. “I’ll take her, Alex. I’ve got her.”
Alex sends them off with a promise that she’ll follow on her bike, and she’s halfway there before she’s able to even really think.
Shit.
She’s been so careful about Maggie’s visits to the DEO—when the place was quiet and mostly empty, when they could have some privacy. Alex always stitched Maggie up herself. And Maggie never stayed long.
But tonight?
Shit.
It’s not like she’s trying to hide Maggie from them. She’s not ashamed of her, of what they’re doing. Of who they are to each other.
They’re not anything to each other. Not really. That’s kind of the point.
She was going to introduce them all to each other. At some point, when she finally planned it all out. When she was ready.
But the thought of Maggie there without her, of her carefully compartmentalized worlds coming together on this random night, when everyone else is still on duty and she’s stuck winding through traffic from the other side of the city—it leaves her with an inexplicable panic lodged deep in her chest.
She grips the handlebars tighter, and if she speeds just a little more recklessly than usual? Well, it’s not like she has a cop perched on the backseat and wrapped around her tonight.
//
“Holy shit,” Maggie laughs as she hops to her feet. “That’s it, I’m only flying Supergirl Airways from now on.”
She smiles at Kara, all dimples and sheer joy, and Kara wonders why her sister won’t just tell everyone about them already. (The perils of superhearing—though it’s almost worth the trauma of that experience to know how happy Alex is with Maggie, even if she refuses to admit it.)
“Thanks for the lift, Supergirl.”
“Don’t mention it,” Kara beams back. “First time’s always pretty exciting for most people. Next time I’ll show you what I can really do.”
Kara glances around. “Hang on, Detective Sawyer… why don’t you head over to the med bay and I’ll find someone to take a look at your head.”
//
That someone ends up being Shaw, since Sawyer insisted she was fine and didn’t need to pull one of the DEO doctors away from an actual patient.
“No, Danvers was right,” Shaw says as she takes a swab of the blood from Maggie’s head to test for toxins. “You’re gonna need a few stitches, and trust me, trying to stitch your own face is not nearly as badass as it seems—unless you want to risk doing a hack job and marring that pretty mug of yours.”
Maggie raises an eyebrow.
“Oh no, not me,” Shaw laughs. “I’ve never done a hack job in my life. Please, you think I’d risk fucking up this face?”
She tilts her head toward the corner of the room, where Root is dressing a burn on her arm from a minor industrial accident.
“I saw that, Sameen.” Root doesn’t look up. “I’d be offended if I didn’t know you liked me a little rugged. And for the record,” she smirks and locks eyes with Shaw, “I like your face a little messy, too.”
Shaw just rolls her eyes and starts prepping Maggie’s wound for sutures.
(It would probably be easier if Maggie would hold her damn face still.)
“Damn.” Maggie shakes her head with a smile. “I like you guys.”
//
Maggie hangs out at the DEO after Shaw finishes patching her up.
She figures she should wait for Alex before she leaves—debriefing after the mission and all that.
It’s a flimsy excuse.
She knows Alex wasn’t ready for this—to work cases with her, sure. To grab a beer afterward, and then go home and fuck after that. It’s a comfortable routine for them at this point, but Maggie’s always known that there are aspects of Alex’s life that she’s not a part of yet. And she wasn’t ready to be, so she never pushed.
But now that she’s here, hanging out with Alex’s friends and her sister (no, Supergirl—that’s another secret she’s not meant to know), she’s having a hard time remembering why.
Why she feels the need to keep making excuses to care about Alex, when they just keep getting flimsier.
She tries to be useful, to keep her hands busy while she waits, so she helps Shaw do inventory on a new batch of equipment that needs to be tested in the field.
And by “helps,” she means something more along the lines of drooling over some of the most beautiful weaponry she’s ever seen.
She lifts up a pistol and practically moans as she feels the heft of it in her palm.
Shaw smirks. “I know, right?”
“Fuck.”
Maggie opens up the next crate and lets out a low whistle when she sees a batch of prototypes for new biometric prisoner restraints.
“Damn. And I thought my gear was pretty.”
“Really?” Shaw laughs as she points to the standard NCPD-issue cuffs hanging from Sawyer’s belt. “Those?”
“Aw, it’s cute that you think I was talking about those. You haven’t seen my nice handcuffs—I only break those out for special occasions.”
A loud clatter echoes near the doorway.
Both their heads snap up to find a slightly breathless Alex hastily grabbing her bike helmet from where she’d dropped it.
iii.
Maggie fights dirty.
Alex may have trained to fight superpowered aliens her entire life, but Maggie’s trained to fight humans. Men. The foulest, most despicable undercurrents of the human race—guys who had no concept of a good clean fight when it came to someone who looked like her.
Alex starts inviting her to spar at the DEO, and soon they have a standing workout date for Tuesdays and Thursdays after Maggie gets off work.
And Sawyer’s good. Some small part of Alex’s brain thinks Maggie really shouldn’t be as much of a challenge for her as she is, but she doesn’t dwell on it.
Those sparring sessions start becoming the highlight of Alex’s week, but Maggie keeps pushing for them to go out to train instead.
“Really, Danvers? You think you’re gonna be fighting your next perp in an illuminated plexiglass-and-chrome fishbowl?”
Turns out she’s a good fighter under controlled conditions, but when they’re out in the field…
Holy fuck.
She can build an improvised explosive device out of pretty much anything. More than once she’s run out of bullets and knocked a perp out with a metal pipe or a cinderblock or her motorcycle instead. She can MacGyver restraints out of coils of electrical wire or industrial cable; once she tied up a trio of pyrotechnically-inclined aliens with a firehose after using it to douse them.
(Plus, she has a penchant for corny one-liners at the most inopportune times on the job, as if she grew up watching shitty old cop movies and still wants to see herself as the hero of one.
Alex rolls her eyes each time, but she can never seem to stop herself from smiling)
//
The amount of time Maggie and Shaw spend together in the DEO’s chem lab starts to make J’onn nervous.
“Relax, Mark Watney,” Root tells him. “They’re just having a little fun.”
Somehow, J’onn doesn’t find that very reassuring.
//
On Alex’s days with Bear, she brings him over to Maggie’s place for doggy dates. Bear and Marco take to each other immediately.
They bring the dogs to the beach, to the park, hiking in the hills overlooking the city. Maggie starts packing picnic baskets.
“Well, we have to eat,” she says.
The next time, Alex brings fresh juice from the farmers’ market. Maggie doesn’t say anything, but she smiles when Alex isn’t looking.
They’re still not in a relationship, Alex insists.
“I know, Danvers. But Marco doesn’t have many friends in National City, and he gets stir-crazy cooped up at home all day with no one to play with.” She winks.
(God, Alex hates it when she winks. As if the dimples weren’t enough to deal with. It’s so unfair.)
Maggie doesn’t mention that time Alex took her out to the DEO’s desert base in the middle of the night to watch a meteor shower from the bluffs overlooking the ocean. (“The light pollution in the city is terrible,” Alex had reasoned.)
They’re not in a relationship. When Alex goes home with Maggie after a mission, or after drinks, or after spending a day with their dogs, she’s always gone by morning. And Maggie’s never seen more of Alex’s place than her bedroom… and her bathtub, and her kitchen counter, and the lounge chair on the terrace.
They’re friends. Maggie has fully ingratiated herself into Team SuperMachine. Even though she’s never slept at Alex’s, she’s crashed at Shaw and Root’s place more times than she can count—when Marco decides he wants to spend the night, he’s 100 pounds of not gonna budge.
They’re not in a relationship. They don’t really know what they are to each other, and neither of them is quite ready to bring that question up.
But they’re something.
iv.
Lucy spends a lot of her time in DC now, part of her new gig as Special Advisor to the President on Alien Affairs and, unofficially, DEO liaison. President Marsdin had personally hired her shortly after Myriad—much to General Lane’s displeasure, considering the role his own botched handling of the crisis played in the President’s decision to hire his daughter.
Her flight back to National City lands at midnight; it’s the first time she’s been home since she started her new job, and she all she wants to do is crawl into her own bed for a change and pass out until morning.
But as soon as she walks up the last flight of stairs to her apartment door—
“Alex?”
—it’s pretty obvious that’s not happening.
“Luce, you’re home!” Alex’s voice pitches up with excitement, more than a little slurred. With some effort, she stands, bracing herself against the wall.
“And you’re drunk.”
Alex doesn’t respond. She’s staring silently at Lucy with a furrowed brow as if she hadn’t heard her at all, focused like she’s been trying to puzzle something out all night and the answer is hidden somewhere in Lucy’s face.
“I don’t know what to do, Luce,” she says finally, suddenly solemn. “I- I think I might be fucking up.”
//
“You know, when I texted to tell you I was coming home tonight so we should grab coffee, I meant like… tomorrow. I really wasn’t expecting a welcoming committee.”
Lucy sets two mugs on the coffee table in front of Alex—chamomile tea, not coffee—and folds herself up on the opposite end of the couch.
“I’m sorry,” Alex groans. “Oh god, Lucy, I’m really sorry, I shouldn’t be coming to you like this, I should just—”
“Alex.” Lucy interrupts, shifting over to place a hand on Alex’s knee before handing her a mug. “Relax. It’s fine.”
Lucy smiles, and she realizes she’s really glad that Alex is sitting on her couch right now, despite her earlier plans.
“I really missed you, Alex.”
Alex looks back up at her, finally, and smiles back. It’s more hesitant than Lucy would like—Alex’s vulnerability twists a little at her, it always has.
“I missed you, too, Luce.”
//
Alex tells her about Maggie.
The whole time, Alex has that look on her face that just makes Lucy want to reach out and wrap her arms around her, but she doesn’t. She’s shifted closer—she’s not on her side of the couch anymore—but she doesn’t touch Alex like she wants to.
Because there’s Maggie.
Because Alex is sitting on her couch on the verge of tears, telling her about Maggie like she’s guilty or something, so Lucy wonders if maybe this is Alex telling her that she isn’t allowed to hold her anymore.
“Okay, so you have a girlfriend now. I’m happy for you, Danvers.”
And she means it, even though she’s got a sinking feeling in her gut as she says it, like she’s falling. Like this time she put her career first and even though she knows it was the right move, she can’t help feeling like she missed a chance she was supposed to take.
But she does mean it. Alex deserves to be in a relationship. She deserves to be happy. To be in love.
Alex shakes her head. “No, Lucy, we’re not- it’s not—”
“I mean it, Danvers.” Lucy cringes a little. It feels wrong to call her Danvers, but she can’t help it. Alex has a girlfriend. “I’m glad you found someone. And you have nothing to feel bad about. The two of us, we were- that’s never what we were. Neither of us was ready for that. We both knew it. And then I left. I never had any illusions about what that meant.”
“Lucy…” Alex sighs. “Mags and I—I don’t think that’s what we are either. I don’t know what we are. I know I care about her but… I care about you, too, Luce.”
Alex glances up at Lucy and, for the first time tonight, doesn’t look away.
“I really missed you, Lucy.”
Lucy stares silently at Alex for a minute. Before she can figure out what to say, Alex reaches over and tucks a strand of Lucy’s hair behind her ear.
“Why did you come here tonight, Alex?”
“I missed you.”
//
It’s 3am by the time Lucy finally gets to crawl into her bed for the night.
Alex is there, too, lying on the side that was hers back when they were… whatever they were, before Lucy left for DC.
Lucy tucks herself into Alex’s side. It’s comforting, familiar in a way she doesn’t really want to think about, not when Alex has a g— not when Alex has a Maggie.
“This was probably a mistake, wasn’t it?” Lucy whispers into Alex’s neck.
“Probably.” Alex is staring up at the ceiling, as if she had Kara’s vision and could look straight through to the stars. “I don’t know.”
She looks down at Lucy. “It doesn’t feel like a mistake.” She hesitates for a moment. “Does it have to be?”
“Have you talked to Maggie about this?”
“Sort of. I’m- I’m not great at the whole talking thing.”
“Really?!” Lucy exclaims with a scandalized gasp. “I never would have guessed.”
Alex laughs and shoves her lightly. “Oh, shut up.”
“Well… you know I’ve been that girl. The girl trying to salvage a relationship with someone who always wanted someone else.”
“I know.” Alex’s voice is small, contrite.
“But the thing about that was… Jimmy and I never talked about it. He always insisted there was nothing going on with Clark, that he and Kara were just friends. And yet, every single time, without fail, he always picked them first. That’s what hurt the most. It always felt like a competition I was losing, and not because I was up against superheroes. Jimmy refused to talk about it, so it felt like I was going to lose no matter how hard I tried because I wasn’t in the race at all.”
“I don’t want this to be a competition,” Alex whispers.
“Well. We’re talking now.” Lucy smiles softly and runs her thumb across Alex’s cheek. “Maybe it doesn’t have to be.”
v.
The first time they all hang out together outside of work, it’s a Sunday night and they’re piled onto Alex’s couch to watch Cat present Kara (well, Supergirl) with a humanitarian award on TV.
Kara had wanted to get them all tickets, but Lucy only has a few nights in National City before she flies back out to DC for three weeks, so she’s trying to spend as much time as she can at home. Plus, as Shaw so eloquently pointed out, people tend to get pissy when you show up at formal award shows in sweats, and she sure as shit ain’t putting on heels and a dress if she’s not allowed to pack heat under it and there isn’t even a chance of fisticuffs in the forecast for the night.
So Shaw, true to form, is wearing a muscle tank and boxer briefs—a new pair that Root bought her with the House of El symbol on the front because come on, Sam, show a little team spirit. (Root is sporting a full-on footed onesie, complete with a blanket cape, because that was the outfit that annoyed Shaw most.)
Alex isn’t used to having this many people over at her place. She thinks she should probably feel a little uncomfortable, considering the fact that the longest relationship she’s ever had in her life has been with her own personal space, but she’s the one who invited them all over tonight.
She’s the one who decided to squeeze herself next to Lucy and entwine their legs together, despite the fact that there’s a perfectly good empty armchair she could have chosen to curl up in.
The two of them end up sitting on the floor in front of the couch because the dogs commandeered their seats while they were gathering snacks from the kitchen. Maggie is perched cross-legged on the couch behind Alex and Lucy; Alex can feel the warmth of her hand resting lightly on her shoulder the whole night.
She was worried about tonight, going into it. Despite the fact that she’d discussed it at length with all parties involved, she’s been waiting for something to go wrong. For someone to get uncomfortable (she was betting on herself), for someone to awkwardly get up and make a break for it halfway through the night (Alex was pretty sure the fact that it’s her apartment wouldn’t stop her from doing so).
But nothing happens.
It feels like the most natural thing in the world when Lucy wraps her arms around Alex’s waist and pulls her close. When Alex gets up to grab some more beers from the fridge, she doesn’t even think before leaning in to give Maggie a quick kiss as she passes.
There’s a blurring of the lines, of the carefully compartmentalized facets of Alex’s life, and Alex realizes she doesn’t mind it.
For her entire life, she’d devoted everything she was, every single piece of herself, to one person. She had to be perfect because Kara needed her to be, because her mother expected her to be, because her father never got a chance to be.
She had to be everything Kara needed in this world, so Alex’s world—well, it had to be Kara. She made one person her entire world, everything she ever wanted or needed, and that was enough.
That’s just how she was built—how she is built. She loves with a fierce loyalty and devotion, and she’s proud of that. But, as Alex looks at the women who surround her now, who have suddenly and unexpectedly filled her world, she thinks that maybe—
Maybe she doesn’t have to be everything to one person; maybe she doesn’t have to find one person to be everything to her.
Not everything. Just something.
Something real and solid and warm.
She thought she might feel fractured like this, as if each part of her, each person she loves, is pulling her apart by the seams. She knows that feeling all too well.
But she doesn’t.
Tonight, Alex feels more whole than she ever has.
This thing they’re doing—it doesn’t make her feel the same way it would have before, like she was putting everyone else first only to always be their second choice. But it also doesn’t mean she cares any less about each of them.
(It doesn’t mean that she regrets any of the sacrifices she’s made for Kara.)
Because they’re all here, tonight, sprawled out across her couch to cheer on her sister—her heart, the biggest and brightest piece of her.
And this—this is enough. She is enough. And for the first time in her life, she doesn’t doubt that. Doesn’t doubt herself. Not for a second.
This isn’t the perfect myth of what she’s supposed to want, of the person she’s supposed to be. But tonight, surrounded by this odd collection of strays, these people who are hers, Alex can’t find any other word for it.
It’s perfect.