Chapter Text
Now this would seem the place to tie up our loose ends, no? The boy has been rescued. The secrets revealed. The villains captured. The heroines happy and in love.
Yes, it would be quite lovely to tie those loose ends up in a neat bow and end our story there.
Unfortunately, the universe has never been quite so neat. But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself, dear reader. Let’s talk about what did happen.
Over the course of the next several weeks, The Tribune published a series of damning pieces linking Lord Technologies, LuthorCorp, and even the US military to a shadowy organization known only as Cadmus. There were the scared teenagers snatched from the streets and drained of their magic, some of whom didn’t survive the process back in the early days. The wizards who had been safely guarding this form of old magic held hostage in underground facilities for months on end. The John and Jane Does—comatose but alive—claimed from hospitals across the state and hooked up to rows of beeping machines to try to transform them into the first new super soldier (though, as a later report revealed, all too frequently they became little more than the next corpse at the local morgue). There were interviews with the hostages and victims. Eyewitness accounts from Supergirl herself. Live footage from none other than James Olsen. And a public crusade led by Cat Grant against Lex and Lillian Luthor, Max Lord, and Sam Lane, all of whom seemed poised to buy their way out of trouble. (Lex alone would manage it, pointing to his very public dismissal from LuthorCorp as he waved his own mother off to prison.)
And so arrests were made. Wrists slapped. Labs dismantled. The beginning of the end, as the media called it.
Until one night, months later, when Cadmus hijacked the airwaves, broadcasting a message of hatred and rage all across the world. A promise that they were hidden but not gone, that their ranks were swelling daily, that nothing would stop them.
That same night, Luthor and Lord broke out of their cells at a federal detention facility—an inside job, by all accounts. To this day, both remain at large.
That same night, Supergirl and Superman were targeted with a substance never seen before. Glowing green, this rock had them dropping from the skies, brought them to their knees, left them half-dead on the streets of National City and Metropolis. “A warning,” Cadmus called it later. A “threat and a promise” of what could come.
That same night, Cat Grant was found, bound to her pristine white chair with electric pink cords, her office ransacked, hard drives smashed, and hard copy files burned. The wall of screens behind her burned with a single message: We Are Cadmus. (According to police reports, the very first thing Cat did upon being released from the bindings was to throw a phone through one of the screens, declaring she’d managed to refrain for decades, but it finally seemed warranted.)
Of course, our dear heroes are neither slain nor defeated. The next night, Supergirl and Cat Grant stood side by side on national television, united as they broadcast a message of peace and hope for a brighter future—a rallying cry for people to stand up and fight back, fight for the ones who couldn’t do it themselves. Seizing on public outrage and a swing in popular opinion, President Marsdin finally pushed the Alien Amnesty Act through the legislature and signed it into law with Superman by her side, declaring it a new day for human-alien relations. The following week, the employees of Lord Technologies and LuthorCorp walked out en masse, leaking internal memos and project plans and condemning what they declared their employers’ continued complicity with Cadmus’ larger goals.
Cadmus may still lurk in the shadows, but our heroes stand tall in the light.
But that’s not what you’re here to learn, is it?
You want to know what’s happened to a reluctant empath who runs a small bookstore on South Main Street in National City and the prickly, self-taught healer who, two months after rescuing dear Peter, moved out of her apartment with its still taped-over window and into the bedroom at the top of the stairs in Blankspace Books. Just what have these two been up to?
Let’s peer in at Alex first, shall we?
Reader, she married—no, my mistake, that’s the wrong story. But let’s find our heroines. Ah, wait. Let’s give them a moment to make themselves presentable—as it turns out, this is not that kind of story.
Here we are now.
You might recall Alex Danvers’ admitting to a stray longing for someone else in her life on those cold, lonely nights she once spent alone.
These days, she is very rarely alone.
Saturday night game nights with her sister and the friends that are no longer just Kara’s have multiplied to two or three times a week. On Wednesdays they all meet in the newly renovated basement of Blankspace Books—a construction project expedited with a bit of help from the city’s resident superhero—to play a selection of family-friendly boardgames with anyone who chooses to show up.
(Winn comes back again on Thursday nights to DM a campaign for any of the kids who want to play. The first few sessions were sparsely populated, with Jasmine, EJ, and a one Carter Grant the only regular attendees. But once word got out that Winn’s fingers sparked with magic and functional props appeared at every game, crowds began to fill the shop’s little café until they finally had to move their game to the basement.)
Alex spends her free nights with her girlfriend Maggie. When she’d first moved in, they’d spent long weeks redoing the upstairs, turning it into their home instead of the apartment Maggie happened to inhabit after inheriting the place years ago. Alex had ventured down to the shop floor, too, insisting upon designing a proper labeling system for the aisles so that not every customer had to rely upon Maggie trying to sense what they needed. And a proper lock for the stairwell had finally been installed after Alex and Maggie were found kissing—and that’s all they’re admitting to, thank you very much—a few too many times. (Enough times that Bee had set up a small chalkboard display behind the register that said little more than, “Number of Days Since Maggie and Alex Were Caught Doing Something Embarrassing: 0.” They once made it to seven whole days, but Bee insisted it didn’t count as a record, since they’d been on vacation for three of them.)
Maggie has begun joking about getting them a bookstore pet to “really complete the stereotype, ya know? We said I love you before the first date and moved in together after a couple months. The obvious next step is to adopt a cat.” Jasmine has insisted she’s far too allergic for them to get a cat, especially now that she’s training to take over as Blankspace Book’s newest barista with Kate headed off to college this fall after saving up for the past several years. (Maggie’s almost positive Jasmine’s not allergic to cats at all and is, in fact, secretly angling for them to get a dog. Maggie won’t push the issue, though, since deep down she knows she wants one too, even if they aren’t nearly so well behaved in a quiet bookshop.)
For now, though, their lives feel full enough with their two shops and the friends wandering freely in and out of them and the dozen or so kids and teens that aren’t theirs, but are family all the same. And that, well, that feels like plenty.