Chapter Text
You dread the day Alexandra becomes a teenager. She’s barely more than you can handle at 4.
On the rare days you can make it out the lab for lunch so you can take her to the park, you end up talking to the other parents as Alex bosses around their children on the playground. Most of them parent as a full-time job, so it takes up most of their conversations. They casually discuss sleep training and public children's television, in the way you and Jeremiah talk about electromagnetic fields and extraterrestrial pulmonary systems.
You love conversations with them. They catch you up on developmental milestones and neighborhood gossip. They tell you which stores are having a sale on laundry detergent, and which brand of juice box is the most nutritious. And they answer your parenting questions without condescension even though you’re sure they seem rudimentary.
They make you feel normal, 35 minutes at a time.
But you’re not normal and that’s impossible to forget the rest of the time. You’ve been involved in over a dozen classified projects and missions, and while you’re not anywhere near the field of battle, you’ve learned enough about high pressure and life-and-death decisions. So when the rest of the parents talk about the horrors of “the terrible twos” and “threenagers” you think they’re being over-dramatic.
Alex is the easiest thing about your life, even though she’s the most stubborn person you’ve ever met. She’s spent the last two years asserting her independence at every turn. She has opinions about what she wears, and what she eats, and what you read to her. She rebels against you at every possible opportunity. She plays you and Jeremiah off of each other like a pro, already able to pinpoint one of the small but persistent cracks in your marriage, and leveraging the entirety of her 35 pounds into them just long enough that you’re both distracted and she gets what she wants.
You always find her out, and she’s genuinely remorseful when you discipline her. She can’t stand hurting you and her father, but she’s also desperate to see how much she can actually get away with. You look at her and see your husband’s unrelenting desire to experiment until he finds the truth, and your own inability to back down from a challenge.
She’s difficult to raise, but even during the moments she’s driving you insane, you feel a swell of affection for how exceptional she is. You’ve loved watching her grow up. You don’t fear her independence.
But you are terrified of her hating you.
She says it already, when she’s furious, usually accompanied by a slamming door. But you’re able to stay calm and remind her you still love her. Because you know it’ll be less than a half hour until she comes to you, tearful and contrite, arms wrapped tight around your neck while she gets out “I’m sorry….I hurted...your..feeeeeeelings” between sobs.
She adores you. You regularly catch her and Jeremiah in another room discussing how pretty you are, or how smart you are, or how you make the best peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the world. You know you are her favorite person. She loves Jeremiah too, preens over him him in public like she wants everyone to know that he’s her father. But you’re the one she calls for when she’s sick, when she wakes up from a nightmare at 3am.
You know this won’t last forever - that she wants all of your attention. That she wants to play with you and ask you for your help, and think you know everything. You’ll be able to handle her making friends, and doing things on her own, and questioning your choices. You don’t need to always be her hero, but you dread the day she sees you as a villain. There is a very good chance, that for at least a while, she’ll think you’re the worst thing that’s ever happened to her. And it’ll break your heart.
Two months ago an alien combatant used a mysterious substance that fell Clark until his powers were gone and he was essentially human. The government gave you and Jeremiah a sample so you could examine it in a controlled environment. Clark has agreed to help you test it’s effects in order to find a way to combat it. You hurt him over and over. You watch him turn deathly pale, veins an unearthly green tint, until he can’t take it anymore and he falls.
You want to protect him from all of it, wrap him up in your arms until he cant feel its effects. Instead you make him hot chocolate after with extra marshmallows. He always thanks you with a hug just tight enough to show you that his powers are still intact. That he’s okay and appreciates it.
Jeremiah and Clark want to officially call it Kryptonite, which you think is a little too on the nose, but you know you’ll eventually agree to.
Sometimes you watch your daughter scowl up at you with fire in her eyes and you think her expression is stronger than whatever this mysterious substance is that can bring a god to his knees.
The only person that ever supersedes you or Jeremiah in Alex’s mind is her preschool teacher, Miss Avery. She was so excited to finally, officially, start school, and now she barely goes an hour without talking about how pretty Ms Avery’s hair is, or how Ms Avery taught her about numbers, or how Ms Avery says you always have to tell your friends you’re sorry when you hurt them. You don’t take it personally because you know infatuation when you see it. If Alex were a boy, you’d say this was a crush, typical early childhood puppy love. If what you suspect about your daughter turns out to be true, you’d say the same thing.
You can’t wait to see the amazing things with her life, and it kills you to think you’ll be perceived as an obstacle to whatever that is. It’s on your mind often as you prepare her elementary school. So one day you slip.
You’re folding laundry as she plays with her toys across the room. You hear a constant stream of chatter in her “very serious” voice, but you can’t hear her actual words over the news. Until she shrieks your name and you turn to her in a panic. You automatically relax when you see she’s not hurt, just impatient. Whatever just occurred to her is the most important thing she can imagine. You ignore the small wrench in your chest at her constant sense of urgency, a trait you sometimes hate about yourself, and you ask her what’s wrong.
You are kneeling down next to her by the time she gets out “Mr. Bananas has a very hard diagnosis, and I needed you for that fancy word for help”
“ A consult?”, you ask, meeting her grave tone, even through your smile.
“Yes! A consult. I need it. This case it very very difficult”
“Hmmm. Well them I’m very glad you called me in Dr. Danvers. What seems to be the problem?”
“Well, Dr. Danvers” she stops to giggle before remembering herself and pulling her posture ramrod straight again. She thinks it’s hilarious any time anyone refers to you or your husband as “Dr. Danvers”. You’ve worked hard for decades to make it as a female scientist, and, for the most part, it worked. People approach your title with the respect and intimidation it deserves. Some have even been a little afraid of you. You’d never let anyone disrespect your education or your position. Except the preschooler in front of you.
“- Mr. Bananas has a tummy ache. And I don’t know if it’s because he ate to many candies or if it’s his ‘ppendix”
“You’re right, that is a very very difficult case.” She nods to herself, a little smug as you continue, “Have you done any tests?”
“Yes. I took his temperature and his bloods”
“And what did they say?”
She rolls her eyes as she exclaims “that his tummy hurts. Duh.” You give her a split second warning glare, eyebrows raised, before you continue, and she appropriately shrinks back just a bit.
“Fair enough. Mr. Bananas, can you jump?”
Alex tilts her head as she looks at you, eyebrows furrowed. You just repeat “well, can he jump?” She gets it, and picks him up bouncing him up and down a few times for you.
You make a big show of considering this and ask, “and are you throwing up at all, Mr. Bananas?” This time Alex gets it right away and lurches him at you while making exaggerated vomit sounds and and giggling at your disgusted expression.
As you wipe off the fake vomit and flick some at her while she flinches away, you tell her “patients with appendicitis tend to have an aversion to jumping due to rebound tenderness, and persistent vomiting is a more common symptom of gastroenteritis. Since he's doing both, I’m going to have to agree with your prior assessment that he ate too much candy.”
She looks up at you with a mixture of awe and pride. She loves it when you or Jeremiah use technical language and she relishes any time you treat her as a peer. She breaks her doctor character as she flings herself at you.
“I knew you could do it mommy! You’re the smartest person in the whole universe! You’re the bestest!”
And that’s where your worry filters into this previously silly moment.
You shake your head as you pull away and say “yeah, you say that now..”
She blinks at you, confused, waiting for you to follow up until it makes sense to her.
“Someday when you’re older, you’re not going to think that anymore. You'll probably even hate me”.
She looks indignant that you would even think such a thing of her, and opens her arms wide and she easily replies, “No I won’t. I’m gonna love you forever!”
You smile as you start putting her stuffed animals away and tell her “it’s okay sweetie. I know you love me. A lot of times really big kids have fights with their moms and don’t like them for awhile. It’s normal. And it usually stops by the time you’re a grown up. Teenagers hate their parents, and I won’t blame you if you do when you’re one. I’ll understand. You’re allowed to feel any way you want about me, okay?.” You put your hand on her shoulder as you finish, and then start to get off the floor.
She turns somber again, stops you by putting her hands on your cheeks and pulls you towards her, holding just a little too tight, as she says earnestly, “I will never ever hate you. Even when I’m a really bigger kid.”
She stops, hands still on your face, as she pushes your cheeks against your teeth, just bordering on painful, and gives you her most serious and sincere expression.
You instinctively know exactly what’s coming next.
“Mom, we’re pals, right?”
Despite everything you want to say, you follow the script.
“Right”
Her huge expressive eyes somehow seem even bigger as she follows up with “and we’ll always be together, right?” You roll your eyes slightly as you realize the lesson you were trying to teach her is in the wind for now.
Every day for almost a year she’s chosen the Lion King to watch after her after-school nap.
Every day for almost a year she’s asked you these two simple questions.
Every day for almost a year you see a flash of the affectionate smile of the mother you lost way too young, and a slamming car door as a teenage Alex tells you she never wants to speak you again, and the lines on her face on the first day you’re no longer there to protect her from all of the dangers of the word.
Most days you answer her with a perfunctory “right”.
Some days you try to remind her of what happens next in the movie; try to teach her about irony and death and the end of things. Of the ache you sometimes feel in your chest for your mother that’s somehow bigger than the rib cage that holds it.
But today you look at her big brown eyes, and her hopeful expression, and the way she’s so sure in the way only a 4 year old can be. So sure that your kisses will always fix her wounds, that you’ll always be her hero, that you’ll always be around. That she’ll always want you around.
And just for today you let your beautiful, headstrong Alexandra convince you that all of those things are true.
Your voice cracks as you deviate from the script and answer her with a shaky but certain, “always”.