Chapter Text
Maggie awoke gradually. The cold, wet spot that pressed against her cheek jarred her to consciousness sooner than she would have preferred. Her tongue felt thick as she licked dry lips. Balanced precariously on the edge of a lumpy cushion, she felt the crick in her neck before she even opened her eyes. A dull throbbing ache radiated from the stiffness in her shoulder. As she began to stretch, a firm hold around her waist tightened—
Her eyes snapped open in alarm. Maggie began to breathe easier as she registered the familiar living room walls of her place on Nevarro. What was unfamiliar was the warm body that pressed behind her.
It'd been some time since she'd last taken a woman to bed. They could've at least made it to a bed. Crammed on this small couch together, the solid form behind her took up well more than should have been her share.
Maggie yawned. She leaned her head to one side until the tension in her neck released with a small pop. Then, the other side. Ready to confront the morning after—or early afternoon—she steeled herself for whatever she might find.
She snuck a glance behind. Her head snapped back like a spring at the sight of a shock of reddish-brown hair. Her heart hammered an erratic thudding beat that was sure to wake her guest. That couldn't be… could it?
A terrifying thought seized her. She peered under the blankets, almost exhaling aloud in her relief to find herself fully clothed. The arms that held her solidly around the middle were sleeved all the way to the wrist with a smooth black fabric that felt like some sort of armorweave.
Risking another look behind, this time she caught sleepy brown eyes peering back at her. "Hey you," rasped a familiar voice, even thick with sleep. She'd known it for so many years, and yet it sounded strange without the tinny echo of beskar.
"Hey—" Maggie croaked, her throat dry. Squeezed on the small couch together, she lay half on top of Alex. She shifted and a corner of beskar poked her in the back.
"I'll try not to get used to this," Alex joked, her voice raspy and deep and…
Maggie stiffened, the movement almost imperceptible, and yet Alex's grip loosened at once. Jerking back, Maggie scrambled to get off of Alex— only to hiss as a sharp pain shot through her shoulder.
"Here, let me look at that." Alex produced an open medkit from the floor.
As Alex worked, Maggie slowly took in their surroundings. Two pairs of boots were strewn haphazardly in a trail from the door. A pair of beskar vambraces and two pairs of gloves sat on the low table in front of them. Her holster was tangled with Alex's, like they'd discarded them on the table only for them to tumble onto the ground together. A familiar visage stared blankly at her from where it laid on its side.
She flinched against the sharp sting of bacta. "Sorry," Alex murmured as she laid on a fresh bandage. Warm fingers soothed against the cool skin of her bare shoulder.
Maggie hadn't been thinking clearly when she'd insisted there was more than enough room for Alex at her place. The second bedroom in her house was completely devoid of furniture. But by then, they hadn't slept for almost a galactic standard day, and the couch had been right there.
"You should probably see a med droid sometime today if you don't want it to scar," Alex said as she smoothed the tape down along the edge of the bandage.
Maggie gaped. Alex was here. She was here, unmasked, and…
Alex fidgeted under the intensity of Maggie's stare. A tinge of color crept up her pale cheeks. Alex started to push herself up as she stammered, "I—I can go—"
"No!" Maggie's hands flew up between them. "No. I wasn't… I didn't… I'm sorry… I—" She registered her own frenzy too late. Looking into Alex's actual face, she was filled with a sudden burst of courage. "Stay."
Alex's silence felt like hesitation. Her confidence faltered. In an Alex-like fashion, Maggie began rambling, "J'onn insisted, but this place is too big for one. There's a second room, and I—I mean, it's not furnished. But we can get you a bed and whatever else you need—"
She cut herself off. Taking a deep breath, Maggie locked eyes with Alex. "I want you to stay."
/ / /
And Alex had stayed. At first, their interactions were stilted—neither really knowing how to live in such close proximity with the other anymore. Even though she'd lived in barracks for most of her adult life, a single roommate was different. She was unprepared for Alex's face to be the first thing she saw in the morning; to see Alex cooking in her kitchen; Alex in her living room, reclining on her couch.
Alex shed her armor like a shell. Unconfined, her presence expanded and filled all of the empty spaces with a nostalgic warmth and an unfamiliar steady strength. She fit into Maggie's space like she'd always belonged. Maggie was unprepared for how quickly they fell back into familiarity.
After just two days, Maggie sensed J'onn trying not to pressure her to get back into the office. She hadn't meant to equivocate with him on her timeline, but part of her feared losing this—whatever this was—with Alex.
That afternoon, Alex reached for her helmet for the first time in days. Maggie's blood went cold, stopping her with a hand on her arm. "Please don't—" She hated the way her voice trembled and broke.
Alex looked up with wide eyes that softened with understanding. "I'm not running or hiding from you anymore," she promised. "There's gear on the Jaig that needs maintenance. And it feels weird going out without the helmet. Like I'm naked…" A blush rose from her collar.
Maggie felt heat flush up her own neck as she retracted her hand in a hurry. But Alex gave her a soft smile that set her heart racing again.
From under her collar, Alex produced a ring Maggie knew well. "This has never been mine."
Ride or die. The promise they'd made as teenagers on the streets of Alderaan.
"You should get back to marshaling," Alex said. "The town needs you." Alex's gaze was steady when she promised, "I'm not going anywhere."
Maggie believed her.
/ / /
They settled into a routine. Maggie wasn't entirely sure what Alex did during the day, but she was always there when Maggie returned in the evenings. Their time together was mostly spent in the comfortable silence of familiarity.
Work was slow one day, and Maggie returned in the afternoon. She caught Alex coming out of the shower in a short-sleeve shirt. Maggie froze. Her jaw fell open so hard, she was sure the only reason Alex looked up was because she heard it shatter as it hit the floor.
How had they been living together for two weeks without her noticing the massive sleeve tattoo? It wrapped up from her wrist, disappearing beneath the sleeve of her shirt.
With Alex frozen in the midst of toweling off her hair, the previously rippling lines of the tattoo were now still. Alex looked at her in confusion. "Uhh, is something wrong?"
"Nugh," Maggie grunted eloquently.
Alex looked down at herself, trying to figure it out but coming up blank.
"I—" Maggie squeaked. She cleared her throat before trying again. "I didn't realize you had gotten new ink, Danvers." She had known. She'd been told by Kara, Lucy, and even Alex herself. But being told—knowing it was there—and seeing it was a different matter.
"I—yeah..." It was Alex's turn to stumble. She mumbled, "dropper stripes could get you killed in the Rim back then." Her sleeve extended past where her dropper stripes had been.
"Can I see?" Maggie asked in an unusual burst of courage. She backpedaled when Alex hesitated. "No. No, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have asked. I know it can be personal—"
"That's not—" Alex hesitated again. "I mean, it is personal. But it's not you. It's, uh—" She grimaced.
"I don't mind if you don't." Maggie stepped forward with a confidence she didn't recognize.
When Alex stepped back and turned away, Maggie tried to tamp down her disappointment. She was blindsided when Alex stripped off her shirt. Fuck. She really should have clarified the reasons behind Alex's hesitation. Her undergarment came off a second later, and Maggie's head was about to implode. Then she saw it, and it was all that she saw.
A beautiful rendering of Alderaan covered the right side of her back and shoulder. Somehow, she hadn't expected that to be what Alex chose to cover her paradropper stripes.
Geometric lines of the sleeve descended from the planet, forming a Mandalorian shriek-hawk in a furious dive. A second shriek-hawk from her left shoulder looked to be either cradling the planet or, perhaps, guarding it. A large krayt dragon snaked across much of her back and around her waist before disappearing under her beltline.
When Alex turned to face her, Maggie gasped as the rendering of their homeworld shifted into a shattered planet. She wasn't prepared for the eerie beauty, nor the pain that the image evoked.
Just below a modestly placed arm, a ribbon of smaller marks wrapped around the left side of her ribcage. Maggie wasn't thinking when she reached out and hovered her fingers over them. "Are these for kills?"
"No—" Alex croaked. She cleared her throat. "That's a popular misconception about Mandalorians."
She took Maggie's hand. "Those aren't the deaths we commemorate," she murmured as she led Maggie through the markings.
"These are my parents."
Stupid, Maggie chastised herself.
"This one was for Moyer." Alex hadn't had a lot of friends in the Rebellion. Moyer had caught a stray blaster bolt after an "all clear." That had been the first time the reality of war and loss had hit home for Alex. Then Alderaan had happened.
A ribbon of four Mandalorian symbols finished the memorial. "These—This is my clan—"
Alex's voice broke, and Maggie switched their grip to squeeze her hand in comfort.
"We believe that you live as long as someone still remembers your name, and a Mandalorian never forgets."
Maggie's eyes were drawn to the mark over her heart. "What about this one?"
Alex was steady when she said, "that's you."
Alex's face betrayed her. She'd spent her entire adult life behind a mask; she had no guile when it came to concealing her emotions. Like when they had been children, everything she felt and thought was written on her face. Maggie read her now just as easily as she had back then.
You've always held my heart.
Maggie shied away from the intensity of Alex's gaze. She dropped her eyes and took in the rest of her.
The former tan lines from their paradropper days were long gone. Uniformly pale, Alex was lean and wiry. All harsh angles and edges, her body was corded with sinews, muscle, and little else. A horrifying array of scars criss-crossed her body.
Alex shrank from Maggie's scrutiny. She flushed before turning to pull on her shirt. "I didn't know who I was after Alderaan… Mandalorians had been nomads for millennia. They'd been a warrior culture for even longer. They'd lost time and time again. They showed me how to survive."
The emotions that clouded over Alex's face kept Maggie silent. "I thought you were thriving in the Alliance." Alex's voice was rough, and she swallowed harshly. "I was wrong to make that choice for you… but I know myself. Who I was then, in that moment, I would always have made the wrong choice."
Alex turned away from her, and Maggie felt the acute loss. The air between them grew thick with tension.
"And I've wronged you every day since. For nine years, four months, and twenty-two days before Sorgan. Every day, I thought of you, and I never contacted you. There's nothing I could do to ever make that up to you."
We can't change the past; we can only move forward. Since they'd met again, she'd seen flashes of a different Alex. Someone who was haunted by the mistakes of her past and was determined not to repeat them. Someone not as rigid, who could see past the mistakes of others. An Alex who was willing to be vulnerable. It was an Alex she wanted to know.
In a leap of faith and a burst of confidence, Maggie stepped forward. Alex's hand was an unfamiliar ice. "You're here with me now," she said.
Hope sparked. "For as long as you want me," Alex promised, "I'll never leave you again."
/ / /
As they did most evenings now, Maggie sat on the couch sipping tea with her toes tucked beneath her. Alex cleaned her armor as she did every night whether she went out in it or not. By the soft light of the fireplace, Maggie watched Alex's sure, steady movements.
Alex paused, her fingers tracing the dent in her helmet. There was a story behind that; pure beskar didn't just dent like that. Alex chuckled softly to herself. "Bev had the bright idea to modify our jetpacks to take rhydonium as a fuel source."
Holding her breath, Maggie kept silent. She didn't know the details of what had happened to Alex's clan. Alex had never even mentioned their names, and Maggie hadn't yet drummed up the courage to ask.
"It misfired on the table, and I stopped it with my head." Alex waved indistinctly at her back, as if she were currently wearing a jetpack. "Because, you know, it's plated in beskar." She cleared her throat. "That's what they told me anyway. When I came to.
"If I hadn't been leaning against a wall, it probably would've snapped my neck. If you ever come down to the engine room of the Jaig, I'll show you the dent. Not a scratch on this side though." Alex sounded almost wistful as she patted the backside of her helmet proudly.
"That concussion was the worst since—"
As suddenly as she'd started, she stopped. Maggie froze as Alex looked up, a tilt to her head and her brow furrowing in thought. "Have I told you about the mother of all krayt dragons? The tattoo?" She gestured again at her back.
"No," Maggie croaked.
Alex lit up as she prepared to launch into a story. "Patented Adenn design. We each got one to commemorate a glorious victory," she said grinning. Her eyes sparkled with humor.
The fondness with which she referred to her clanmates made Maggie's heart ache. But in the telling of her story, there was no trace of sadness. Maggie was captivated.
The anecdotes and stories came regularly after that. Some nights, they'd walk the town. On others, they'd venture out into the desert to camp beneath the stars. And still other nights, they would stay in and curl up together by the fireplace. But always, Alex told her stories.
At first, they were about her clan and the trouble that they'd gotten into together. It was during one such story that Maggie caught it.
"Wait," she interrupted. Alex was just getting into a particularly animated part of the story. After mis-identifying animal dung, Ori'vod was leading the rest of the clan through Lothal's wilderness on a wild chase for long extinct Loth-wolves. "You couldn't have been at Lothal before the Imperial destruction. That happened the year before Alderaan. We heard about it together. You got so drunk, I practically carried you to your bunk. I sat up with you all night as you puked your guts out."
Alex blushed at the memory. "Yeah, I know," she agreed in a confused drawl. "I wasn't with them yet."
Alex was sharing more than just her own history. She'd told her stories in such vivid details that Maggie hadn't even realized it. Alex was sharing her clan.
And then, Maggie started telling her own stories too. She found herself telling Alex about how she'd been on Mon Cala during Jakku, missing out on the seminal battle of the war. The ocean training drops they'd been running—that had little utility before Jakku—had become instantly useless with the fall of the Empire. They'd celebrated at the time, not realizing their entire company would be dissolved within the month.
She told Alex about the time she'd been so hungover, she'd stepped on a Hutt's tail on Nar Shaddaa and lived to tell the tale. She even told a few anecdotes from her time with the Chandrilan Security Force. Before she knew it, Maggie was sharing more of herself with Alex than she'd had with anyone since Alex.
From the ashes of what they'd had before, they built the foundation for something new. This time, Alex stayed, and they had all the time in the galaxy.