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J’onn had promised that the lingering effects of Psi’s psychic invasions would fade with time, but Maggie was done with waiting. Done with waking up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat because she’d had to listen yet again as Alex told her she wasn’t enough, to watch as Alex shook her head and dropped her hand and slid off her engagement ring, to feel as Alex made love to her one last time in a bed she would never again call theirs.
They were hardly the only nightmarish recreations of Psi’s visions that haunted her. Her parents came back only to turn their backs on her once more, wrinkling their noses in disgust and spitting out derisive comments about her “lifestyle” and the shame it brought on their family. Her aunt appeared out of nowhere, pursing her lips and swallowing back regret as she reflected on how much she had sacrificed for Maggie—the life she had lost because her niece had to be different, the small fortune the addition of another mouth to feed, another body to keep warm, had cost her. But those dreams were different. She’d already survived her parents’ disapproval. She listened to them reject her and watched as their faces morphed from love to disgust. And, no, her aunt had never come out and told Maggie she was an imposition, but Maggie wasn’t blind to the changes her existence brought to her aunt’s life. Late at night when she couldn’t sleep, she used to creep out from her spot on the futon and peer into the kitchen, watching as her aunt sifted through the bills to be paid, separating them out by order of importance. Water and electricity always went to the far left, while things like cable and garbage got pushed down the line; there was always the shopping center across the way with its industrial-sized dumpsters to leave their garbage at and stacks of old VHS tapes to be watched during their rare hours of free time.
But the Alex of her nightmares…Maggie barely recognized her, certainly hadn’t spent years grappling with the reality of what it might mean to hear from the woman she called her fiancée that she wasn’t enough, would never be enough. She’d dared to believe Alex when she promised Maggie that she alone was more than she could ever have dreamed of. After all, it was Alex—Alex, who had come out for Maggie and kissed her within a week of admitting she was gay; Alex, who had been so fervent in her promises of “forever” and a “lifetime of firsts” with Maggie; Alex, who had opened her home to Maggie and shared her band of chosen family with Maggie and welcomed her into her life so convincingly that Maggie started to believe she might belong.
With every replaying of the scene overnight, Maggie felt herself growing more and more convinced that one day it could come true.
“Maggie?” Alex’s voice was barely a whisper, but it rang out like a shot in the silence of the apartment.
Maggie listened to the sound of Alex’s footfalls as they padded down the few stairs leading up to the bed, then across the dark apartment, deftly navigating around furniture in the way only years of living in a space made possible.
“Maggie, are you here?”
Maggie jolted then, hearing the waver to Alex’s voice, the slight crack to her words and the tightness of her throat that could only mean one thing. “I’m right here. I’m here, don’t worry.”
“Oh.” Alex hovered at the edge of the couch where Maggie was curled up into a tight ball, her head resting on the throw pillow and the quilt they kept out there for movie nights wrapped around her. “Are you…do you want me to go?”
“No, no. I…what’s wrong?” Maggie watched as Alex wrapped her arms tighter around her ribs, as if being strong enough physically could hold back anything else that came her way. If Alex moved a few feet closer, Maggie knew she’d be able to see the slight wobble to Alex’s lower lip as she sucked it between her teeth.
“Nothing. I’m being stupid.”
“Alex.”
“I…I just woke up from…and you were gone. And what if it was real?”
“Oh, Alex. Come here.” Shifting into a seated position, Maggie lifted the corner of the quilt, patting the couch cushion beside her until Alex shuffled forward, tucking herself into the side of Maggie’s body and letting her head fall to Maggie’s shoulder. “Want to talk about it?”
“Not really.”
And as much as Maggie understood the sentiment, she could feel the tension still coiling Alex’s muscles tight, the damp press of the sweat still beading along Alex’s hairline against her shoulder, the faintest of tremors to Alex’s hands. “You’ve always been there for her.”
“Sometimes I wasn’t.”
“Really? Who jumped through a portal to another planet to rescue Kara when she didn’t have her powers?”
“It wasn’t—”
“Who disobeyed orders from the President of United States to keep Kara safe?”
“I don’t think many people would call that a positive.”
“Who flew a fucking alien spaceship out of Earth’s atmosphere to save Kara’s life when she thought for sure that would be it?”
“It wasn’t her!” Alex snapped her mouth shut, the words ringing in the air.
“What?”
“It wasn’t Kara that I couldn’t save.”
“I don’t…”
“I told you about what Psi made me see the first time.”
Maggie nodded. Alex had stumbled away from Psi, falling to her knees, her face a sickly shade of white, barely suppressing the urge to vomit. At first Maggie could only make out a short phrase or two—“too late,” “Cadmus,” “Kara and Dad”—but eventually Alex had told her about the full nightmarish vision she’d been forced to experience, losing her sister and her father to Lillian as she stood there, helpless, unable to move or even speak.
“That, um, that wasn’t what I saw the second time.”
Maggie’s brows furrowed. Alex had refused to speak after the second encounter with Psi when they finally got her into containment. She’d dropped off her weapons in the armory, then shut herself away in the single-person bathroom near her office, emerging nearly half an hour later with dried tear tracks down her cheeks. Maggie had assumed it must have been the same vision—perhaps with more grisly details, but nothing fundamentally new. “What…what happened?”
“I was still too late.” A shudder wracked through Alex’s frame, and Maggie reached out her free hand, leaving it facing up in case Alex wanted it. “I couldn’t save you.” Alex’s voice broke on the final word, a sob forcing its way out.
A pang of guilt hit Maggie and hit her hard. While she slept alone on the couch, convincing herself that Alex would simply up and leave her over a single fight that had never before been an issue, Alex was living out her worst nightmares, which apparently centered around not being enough for Maggie in her own way.
“Come here. I’m right here, see?”
Alex let Maggie guide her hand over to Maggie’s chest, feeling the steady thrum of her heart beneath her fingers.
“You and me, we’re in this together.”
“But what if I’m not—”
“And what if I’m not, Alex? What matters is that I know for a fact that you’re going to be fighting for me. Even if I have to fight to hold on just a little longer, I still know that you’re working your way to me.”
“Always.”
They stayed like that for a long while, curled up side-by-side on the couch, Alex’s hand still resting on Maggie’s chest as her own heart rate finally began to even out.
As Maggie’s eyelids drooped, her head falling to Alex’s shoulder, Alex nudged her. “Why were you out here?”
“Hmm?”
“Why were you sleeping on the couch?”
“Oh, uh…” Maggie scrambled for an excuse that sounded real. “I couldn’t sleep—didn’t want to wake you, that’s all.”
“You know we have more fun ways of helping each other sleep than moving out to the couch, right?”
Maggie forced her mouth to curl up into a smile. It wasn’t Alex’s fault that everything felt tainted by a last time conjured up by some psychic metahuman. “Yeah, no, I, uh, I know.” She shrugged. “You looked like you were sleeping soundly for a change.”
“For a while, I guess.”
“Let’s go back to bed. Try to get in a few hours of sleep before we have to be up for work.”
---
As the days passed, Maggie’s nightmares grew more and more complex. She imagined days, even weeks of bitter fighting. She watched as not only Alex, but everyone she’d come to care for, everyone she’d started to think of as her own kind of family, slipped away and left her behind. She listened to herself plead with Alex one last time, only for Alex to push her away, insisting that what she wanted was anything and everything Maggie couldn’t offer her.
A full week later, Maggie’s phone buzzed with a text from Alex. “We need to talk.”
The half a bagel she’d managed to eat at breakfast churned in her gut, and Maggie’s skin felt clammy and cold. She knew those words. She’d heard those words far too many times to think they were anything other than a deliberate choice. She managed to send back an, “Okay,” before she had to push her phone to the far corner of her desk, burying herself in paperwork while blasting music through her headphones until 5 o’clock crept up on her. Part of her debated pretending there had been some last minute crime, but of course Alex would know she was lying. Even if it had nothing to do with aliens, Supergirl would still be tapped into anything big enough to require Maggie to stay late for a case outside of her own division.
On the drive home, she hit every green light and cursed the universe for it.
By the time she got to the apartment, she was filled with a mix of nervous anticipation and a kind of frustrated resignation.
“Alex?”
No answer.
Maggie poked around the apartment before resolving herself to waiting. Maybe Alex had chickened out.
Several minutes later, Maggie heard the scrape of a key in the lock, followed by a loud thump, then a grumbled, “Fucking hell,” in a voice far too familiar for her to get nervous that someone was trying to break in. She jogged over to the door, undoing the bottom lock and pulling it open to reveal Alex, clutching a large pizza box in one hand, a six pack of Maggie’s favorite beer tucked under her other arm, and her keys still in the lock.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, sorry. I started to drop the beers, then the pizza started falling to one side when I made a grab for them, and, yeah. Anyway.”
“What, uh, what is all this?”
“Dinner.”
“I got groceries yesterday.”
“They’ll still be here tomorrow.”
Maggie swallowed heavily as Alex motioned toward the couch, plunking the pizza box down on the table and tossing one of the paper plates to Maggie. While Maggie got herself a slice, knowing better than to take more than one when her stomach was that twisted up in knots, Alex grabbed a bottle opener from the kitchen, popping the caps off two of the bottles before putting the rest in the fridge.
“What did you want to talk about?” Maggie asked at the same time Alex began, “What’s been going on with you?”
“I, uh, guess that’s what you wanted to talk about, huh?”
Alex gave a small nod. “I just…I feel like I’m missing something. Like even when we’re talking about the same thing, I’m missing some detail.”
“I don’t—it’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing!” Alex rubbed at her face with her hands. “I feel like you’re a million miles away from me whenever we’re together. And I don’t know what I did, but I want to make it right.”
“You didn’t do anything Alex.”
“Clearly I did!”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Then what? Are you mad at Kara or something? Is it something the DEO did?”
“No.” Maggie groaned, sliding her plate back onto the table. She shouldn’t have even gotten a slice in the first place. “I just…I keep…are you sure you want to marry me, Alex?”
“Oh my god, is this because I never rescheduled the food tasting? I swear, it’s not because I don’t want to do it. Everything has just been so busy, and—”
“No.” Maggie waved her hand, bracing herself to ask questions whose answers she wasn’t sure she was ready to hear. “It’s…you could find someone better. Someone who makes you happier. What if I can’t give you everything you want? Everything you…you need?”
“Where’s this coming from?”
Maggie shrugged.
“Maggie, you are the person I want by my side for the rest of my life. I know that I didn’t really do the best job of asking you to marry me what with the whole near-apocalypse and half the city still on fire, but even though there wasn’t a speech, I meant it.” Maggie swallowed heavily. “I want to get up there in front of everyone we care about and promise to spend the rest of forever with you. I want to wake up every day knowing that you’re by my side and get excited about leaving work because I know I’m coming home to you.”
“I want all that too, but what if…what if there’s something you want that I can’t give you?”
“Maggie.” Alex put her beer down, pulling her feet under her on the couch to turn towards Maggie. “You make me happy. You make me feel safe and loved and respected. What more could I ask for from a partner?”
Maggie sniffled, roughly wiping away the hot tears prickling at corners of her eyes.
“Do you want to tell me brought this on?”
“It’s stupid.”
“So Psi?”
Maggie’s head snapped up. “What?”
“Come on, what do I say every night when I wake up with a nightmare about losing someone close to me because I wasn’t fast enough?”
“It’s stupid,” Maggie mumbled.
“You”—Alex’s gaze fell to the couch, and she picked at a stray thread on her pants—“you never did tell me what you saw when Psi cornered you.”
Maggie gulped.
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“Sorry, no, I just…I don’t know. It was…expected, in a lot of ways.” Alex nodded, resting the tips of her fingers on Maggie’s leg. Maggie couldn’t help but feel her heart clench at the thoughtfulness of it, the reminder that Alex had listened when Maggie told her she didn’t want to be held when she was upset—just wanted some small reminder that someone else was there and listening until she was ready for more. “Made me relive some stuff with my parents, imagine a few new ways they could come back and tell me how disappointed they are. My aunt talking about what a burden I was, how much she regrets taking me. Um, you, uh, telling me I wasn’t enough for you, that you didn’t want to be with me anymore.”
“And you”—Alex worried at her lower lip—“you thought I would do that?”
“No! Or, I mean, not at first. It, you know, fit with the theme. But it didn’t seem—we’re engaged, right? That has to mean something.” Alex nodded, her whole upper body bouncing up and down with the force of it. “But then…living it out again and again every night… I don’t know. You sit with something long enough and it starts to creep in. Like maybe I’m not enough. Hell, you probably could do better. And if I’m not going to give you everything you need—”
“Maggie,” Alex cut in. “You—you are what I need. Not anything else or anyone else. It’s you, Maggie. Since the day you tried to claim jurisdiction out there on the tarmac, it’s always been you.”
Maggie’s mouth twitched, and she pulled Alex’s hand all the way up into her lap, twining their fingers together. “You’re definitely getting soft on me.”
“Maybe a little. Gotta defend my honor against nightmare-Alex, though.”
“Yeah…she’s pretty cold.” Before Alex could respond, Maggie took a deep breath. “And it’s not…I don’t make a habit of believing some spike of anxiety about you. It’s just…”
“Psi’s psychic visions are particularly detailed and seem to have a way of burrowing so deep inside your subconscious that they seem more like memories than anything else?”
“Yeah…yeah, something like that.”
“I get it. Why do you think I wake up so freaked out most nights? It’s not—I’ve had nightmares before. But this is a rather particular brand of nightmare.”
Maggie nodded slowly, letting herself be calmed by the solid weight of Alex’s hand in her own.
“J’onn swears the effects are supposed to get better with time.”
“Anything we can do to speed this shit up? Cause I’m a little tired of it.”
Alex snorted. “What if…” And then Alex had that look in her eyes—the same one she’d gotten before she kissed Maggie in the bar after coming out to Kara, or when she’d run off to plant bombs all over a Cadmus warehouse, or the first time she’d asked Maggie about doing a very particular something in the bedroom. The look that screamed: even if I haven’t been thinking about this for that long, I’ve thought almost exclusively about this since it occurred to me and know it’s what I most want to do.
“What if what?”
“Maybe we need some distance.”
“Yeah?”
“And maybe…maybe we treat Psi like the dementor she is.”
Maggie let out a bark of laughter. “Danvers, what are you—”
“Let’s go somewhere with sunshine and happy memories that have nothing to do with the DEO or Supergirl or National City.”
“Don’t you need chocolate too?”
“Oh, that can be arranged.”
“So do you have some sunny, happy, chocolatey destination already in mind?”
Alex beamed and nodded and didn’t say a word.
“Is it a surprise?”
Alex nodded again.
“And is there anything I can do to get it out of you?” Maggie wiggled her eyebrows, trying to drive away the swooping remnants of discomfort at the imagined memories. “Anything at all?”
“Nope.” Alex popped the p, grinning broadly up at Maggie. “But if you want to use some of that sick leave I know you’ve been hoarding since you started at NCPD to call out with a bad case of the flu or the black lung or the bubonic plague or whatever the kids are calling it these days—”
“Just you, Danvers,” Maggie interjected.
“—and give me a few hours to get things ready in the morning, you’ll find out.”
“I can’t really say no to that offer, can I?”
Alex’s answering smile said it all.
---
The next day, after Maggie’s captain happily granted her leave—apparently HR had been on him about the sheer number of overtime hours she had been pulling lately—she found herself seated in one of the DEO-issued cars, the Barenaked Ladies blasting, two suitcases in the trunk, and still no clue about where she was going.
“You gonna blindfold me next, Danvers?” Maggie laughed.
“Can’t say I haven’t thought about it.”
“You’re ridiculous, you know that?”
“I believe the kids are calling it extra these days.”
Maggie let out a snort of laughter. “Kara teach you that one?”
Alex’s lips twitched, though she kept her eyes on the road. “Maybe.”
Somehow talk about Kara’s Buzzfeed addiction turned into rambling musings about their ridiculous quizzes that claim to know what career you should have based on whether you would prefer brie over mozzarella and camembert, and that turned into a whole long chat about how different their lives could have been had they pursued different paths.
Eventually it became clear that they were headed north up the coast. “Are we going to Midvale?”
“Took you long enough, detective,” Alex teased.
“Excuse me, I was a little bit busy trying to figure out what my life would have been like if Julie Andrews showed up and told me I was a princess and needed to find myself a wife to assume the throne.”
“Excuses, excuses.”
“Yet you still managed to lose to me at Clue three games in a row at Kara’s last month.”
“You were cheating.”
Maggie gasped and folded her arms over her chest. “Was not! I won fair and square because I am an excellent detective.”
“And every time I went to make a guess, you slid your hand up my thigh just high enough to throw me off.”
“Well that’s just you being bad under pressure, Danvers.” Maggie ignored Alex’s glare, humming happily as she stared out the window, watching the coast zoom by.
One stop for coffee and snacks, one bathroom break, and two hours later, they pulled off the wooded roads into the neighborhood where Alex grew up, passing manicured lawns and pruned hedges before finally turning into the driveway.
And even though Maggie had only been up to Midvale twice before—once for the end of Hanukkah after cases kept them tied up for the first few days and a second time for a surprise party Kara had organized for Eliza’s birthday—she felt herself relaxing at the sight of the house. The sound of the ocean waves crashing on the shore and the chirping and buzzing of the surrounding woods settled her in a way she hadn’t expected, and she smiled as Alex hand wound around her own.
“Ready?”
Maggie nodded, reaching out to take the second suitcase from Alex. As they trudged up to the door, Alex fished her house keys out of her pocket.
“Your mom’s not home yet?”
“She’s actually out of town at a conference. Kara was gonna fly up a few times to bring in the mail, but I figured it might be nice to come up here…just, you know, be on our own for a few days without all the responsibilities.”
“Besides getting the mail,” Maggie teased.
“And don’t forget watering the flowers,” Alex added as she nudged open the door, tossing her duffel bag to the side.
“How could I ever?”
Alex grinned over her shoulder as she turned to head into the kitchen. “I know it’s not really warm enough to go in the ocean, but I thought maybe we could walk down to the beach? Or I could make coffee, and we could sit on the porch for a while?”
“They both sound perfect.”
“Maybe we go down to the beach first then?”
Maggie nodded, taking off her boots and socks and slipping on a pair of the cheap flip-flops Kara kept by the door for trips like these. In the meantime, Alex took the stairs two at a time to get her own shoes from her childhood bedroom and smile at the tiny bed that would be theirs for the next few days.
A short walk brought them down to the beach, and Maggie took the opportunity to pull off her flip-flops, wiggling her toes in the sand and basking in the warmth of the early afternoon sun. She reached out her free hand for Alex’s then, guiding them down closer to the ocean. The waves were small—the kind Alex would scoff at if she had brought her board down—but Maggie thought they were perfect. Just the gentle roll of water out and back and out again, the sounds fading into soothing background noise that drowned out the incessant hum of anxious worrying that had been running through her thoughts ever since Psi arrived in National City.
They walked quietly for a long time, letting the sound of the surf and the squawking of the seagulls fill the silence.
“This is beautiful,” Maggie whispered, feeling like speaking any louder would upset the balance they had struck with nature.
“It is.” Alex took in a deep breath through her nose, slowly letting it filter out again. “I never…I didn’t think I’d get to share it with someone I cared about in this way.” She shook her head. “I mean, it was this spot for my dad and me for so long, and then Kara came, and sometimes she liked it down here, but sometimes it was a little overwhelming for her—all the sounds and the people during the summer. And then…for a while it was hard to be here.” Maggie squeezed Alex’s hand. “No, it—it’s not painful anymore. It’s good. It’s a reminder of”—Alex paused, her lips parted as she considered her words—“all the good things we had.”
“Yeah, I get that.”
“And I know that I’ve talked about how you helped me to be myself, but this beach—it did too. Coming out here and surfing—they were how I dealt with things, kept myself sane during high school. And when Mom and I would fight when I was back from college, I’d come out here to be alone. And after”—Alex swallowed heavily—“after the tank and all, it was here that I started to remember that water wasn’t bad.”
Maggie pressed a soft kiss to Alex’s shoulder, shutting her eyes at the memory of the morning after Eliza’s birthday party.
She’d woken up to Alex sitting in bed, her wetsuit draped across the chair and a box of old photos from surfing competitions in her lap. While Kara and Eliza went out for groceries, Maggie and Alex began their slow descent down the beach, hand-in-hand, Alex’s trembling slightly the closer they got to the water. But she had been adamant about it. She was able to shower alone again, and she’d managed to get to the point of swimming laps in the DEO pool with J’onn or Kara around, but this—the ocean, vast and dangerous as it was without any external threats—was the challenge Alex decided she needed to set for herself.
They had inched out into the water. First standing still and letting the foamy remnants of the waves come to them, then following the receding surf a few small steps at a time until it was up to their ankles, then their shins, then their knees, then finally all the way up to their hips. They stood there for a long while, Alex’s arms looped around Maggie’s neck, and Maggie’s wrapped tightly around Alex’s waist. They let the larger waves swell under them, wetting them up to their armpits and splashing droplets of salty water across their necks and faces.
They let it be enough for that day, but day by day, they swam out a little further until Kara took Maggie’s place to go out into the deep water with Alex, treading water beside her as she sat on the surfboard that had once been her tether to the past and happier moments.
Alex’s voice broke Maggie out of her thoughts. “I never imagined having someone like you, but I’m so glad I found you.” She let out a soft laugh. “I’m so glad you didn’t let me run away yelling that I wasn’t gay and leaving it at that.”
“C’mon, at that point, I bet you wouldn’t have let it rest. Even if I’d never said another word, you would have started to wonder.”
“Maybe,” Alex admitted.
“Scientist’s curiosity and all that. You’d have been trying to test yourself and hypothesize and run experiments until you figured out an answer.”
Alex shook her head but didn’t deny it. “I’m happier that you stuck around, though.”
“Me too,” Maggie whispered.
Eventually they turned around, walking back to the section of beach behind the Danvers’ house and plopping down into the sand. Maggie let her head fall to Alex’s shoulder, and Alex wound her arm around Maggie’s back, pulling her in closer.
“I know all the venues on our list are in National City, but…what would you think about doing something here?” Alex asked.
Maggie glanced around them, looking at the covered back porch where she could imagine caterers setting up food, the well-worn path from the back door down to the sand that could easily serve as an aisle, the flat stretches of beach where they could set up rows of chairs for their ragtag group of friends and family.
“Never mind, it’s not—”
“No, I—I kind of love it.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Alex’s free hand came around to cup Maggie’s jaw, her thumb stroking across the soft skin of Maggie’s cheek before she ducked her head forward and captured Maggie’s lips in a kiss.
Maggie could feel Alex smiling into it, her lips pulling up and back before she seemed to catch herself, remembering what she was meant to be doing and kissing Maggie once more.
As the kisses grew increasingly heated, Maggie let herself be guided down to her back, too happy to care about the gritty sand that was surely lodging itself in every crevice of her clothing. And for the first time in several long weeks, as her lips parted for Alex, she wasn’t dragged back to Psi’s visions. Instead, she let the heat of the kiss spread, warming her all the way down to her toes. It was only when Alex’s hands slipped under her shirt, drawing a needy, gasping whimper from Maggie, that she stopped them.
“Are you okay?” Alex’s eyes roamed over Maggie’s body, but Maggie simply smiled and placed a gentle kiss to Alex’s lips.
“I’m good. But I really, really don’t want sand in certain places, and by my estimations, we have a perfectly nice house only a few yards away without a family member in sight to interrupt us…”
Alex was on her feet in an instant, showering Maggie’s body in a cloud of sand as she reached out an arm to pull her up. “If you let me help you out of those clothes on the back porch, we won’t even have to worry about vacuuming.”
“That right there”—Maggie interspersed the words with kisses—“is some excellent logic, Danvers.”