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Forgiveness.
The mere thought of it curdles like weeks-old spoiled milk, sour and nauseating, at the edges of her mind.
They talk about it so abstractly. They talk about how easy it should be.
How satisfying it should feel.
Forgiveness, they say sometimes, is like the truth.
It will set you free.
Like she's the one that’s some type of prisoner that needs to pay penance, instead of the one who actually did it.
And the audacity of the concept is almost enough to make her laugh, a laugh she’s sure will scratch its way out her throat, sharp and ugly, because she hasn’t laughed in so, so long.
Forgiveness, they say, is a virtue.
But all Alexandra Danvers wants is revenge.
… … … …
After the last funeral, she hadn’t left the house for days.
She hadn’t talked, she hadn’t slept, she hadn’t eaten.
She had pushed everyone away. Her friends. Her own family.
Had said she needed space.
That she needed time to think.
Instead, she had sat down in a kitchen chair and stared at a bottle of scotch that had been years old at that point and wondered what it would feel like the drink it all in one go.
She had stared at it for hours.
In a silent apartment.
In a dead apartment.
Then poured the entire bottle down the drain.
…. .... … …
There is a darkness inside of her.
Cold and sour.
Ever present.
Festering like a wound since that day.
Staining the crevices of her mind, gouging out whatever warmth, whatever feeling that remained, instead flooding her with such a deep hatred that, prior to this, she thought would ever have been possible to exist, much less wield.
It scares and comforts her, how accustomed she’s come to it.
How the glassy, thick, foreboding feeling is somehow eating her alive, but fueling her all the same.
Because Alex has seen cruel things in this world. Awful, horrifying, atrocious things.
She hadn’t risen through the ranks, from consult to special agent to assistant director, and even years before then when she’d gone on her bender, and even years before that in Midvale, without knowing what people were willing to do to each other.
She has seen corpses, has smelled copper, has heard those heart wrenching cries of despair, has felt warm blood of those she’d tried to save with her own two hands.
And back then, she had prided herself with never stooping down to that level of the monsters that were the cause.
But now….
Now none of it compares to this feeling.
None of it even rises to the occasion.
Because this horror is personal.
This pain is hers.
It is raw like a nerve exposed to air.
It burns like the inside of a convection oven.
It fucking hurts.
And how can Alex describe it?
The way her heart shatters every time she glances around in an empty apartment where she’s always been and where she’s not now, only to be greeted by cold air and nothingness.
The way her soul is ripped apart when she doesn’t hear that easy laughter, those murmured words, the barely contained exuberance.
How could someone do this?
How could she have done this to them?
It is two weeks after…. after everything.
Two. Weeks. After.
And she is forced to let people back into her life, little by little, or otherwise risk being committed to some kind of psych ward.
Yet the loneliness grates at her, the emptiness threatens to swallow her whole, and the pain… the pain is almost too much.
But the darkness?
It keeps her alive.
The rage within it keeps her going.
The fury makes it possible to put one foot in front of the other and carry this ‘tragedy’ with her on her back.
It is what her allows her to swallow around the lump in her throat each time a friend, a colleague, a fucking stranger comes up, eyes sad and filled with pity, and says “I’m so sorry for your loss,” or “It will get better with time.”
Because she isn’t moving forward after what happened.
She doesn’t want too.
She doesn’t know if she can, knowing how it all played out.
Instead she revels as the darkness pulses, the anger sets her nerves alight and her thirst for revenge only gets stronger.
It’s all she can hold on too.
… …. ..
Alex can’t go back to work.
It’s another thing she ripped away from her.
Her career as a field agent is as good as done.
A part of her knows that if she actually started physical therapy, worked hard, and put in the effort, J’onn had a cushy desk job waiting for her.
He’d said as much in more words than that.
But it doesn’t matter.
And she can’t bring herself to care.
Maggie is gone.
Kara is gone.
And in a lot of ways, Alex is too.
… … ….
The thought of vengeance consumes her.
Like an obsession that seems to fill every aspect of her life.
Until she’s eating revenge and drinking retribution.
The good thing about not being at the DEO, is that there are less distractions.
There is more time.
And with less distractions and more time, it gives her ability to form that haggard, misshapen idea of vengeance into something concrete.
Until early, early mornings and late, late nights are devoted to brainstorming sessions.
Planning. Perfecting. Meticulously planning out each and every detail. Blue-prints. Shift rotations. Poisons. Drugs. Anything to make it long and suffering and as painful as possible. To make her feel the pain she does. And even that might not be enough.
She’s not stupid. None of this goes within ten feet of a computer.
Not with them watching her like a hawk. Calling every day to make sure she hadn’t done something stupid, convinced she’s only moments away from dissolving into a mess, but still respecting her wishes and giving her space.
No.
Instead, the inky words are all written down in excruciating detail into a spiral notebook.
Filling page after page until her hand cramps from the constant idiosyncratic shorthand.
Then still going after, because with every page that is filled, it is one step closer to retribution.
Alex wonders if this is what she did for days, weeks and months on end, when she thought up this disgusting tragedy.
Wonders when she started thinking like that monster.
Wonders when she became that monster.
And can’t bring herself to care.
… …. ..
She writes and writes and writes.
Until one notebook is two. Then three.
And there is no back up plan.
There is no contingency.
There is no thinking about what happens after.
If this works.
Because honestly, what does she even need after revenge?
… …. …. ...
Lucy is driving her crazy.
Her friend had all but abandoned her successful career, citing some inane technicality, that Alex knows is nothing but a bold-faced lie, and relocated back to National City under the guise of getting back in touch with her roots.
Another lie.
But Lucy is set on the idea that someone needs to look out for her, even when Alex knows she doesn’t need anyone looking out for her and has taken it upon herself to be the one to do so.
Though the youngest Lane never says it, her concern is palpable, and Lucy shows it harshly and fiercely, because the Air Force officer has never known such things as kid gloves.
She had shown up three weeks after the last funeral and said that Alex has done enough wallowing and that they have given her enough space and that this self-imposed isolation is not doing anyone any favors.
And Alex had sat, stone faced and empty, reveling in the darkness, and waited for her to go away.
Forgetting in those moments, that Lucy was a Lane, a Lane like her sister, a Lane like her father.
That she wouldn’t just go away.
And she doesn’t.
Her persistence is distracting, and her unwavering pursuit to get Alex to do something other than sit and simmer in this goddamn empty apartment, makes it more and more difficult to focus all her energy and time on her plan, until dodging concern becomes second nature, and eventually she has to relent because Lucy won’t just go away.
So every Monday and Thursday, Alex gets in a car with Lucy who drives her to talk to some soft-spoken, grey-haired therapist that is so far removed from what could have happened she should have laughed.
And after ninety minutes of offering up carefully crafted, polite answers to make it sound like she’s opening up, Lucy takes her to a restaurant, a new one every time, to every place except Nonan’s, and forces a meal, a real meal that isn’t a peanut butter sandwich when she remembers, down her throat, before taking her home.
Every time she bites into the food it tastes like ash and every time she swallows it grates like broken glass.
In the past, she might have been appreciative, but now she's annoyed.
Because it's six hours taken away from the plan.
Time she can’t even make up because she’s already barely sleeping.
Not with their faces still floating in the backdrop of her memories.
But she’ll keep on doing it to satisfy Lucy.
She’ll do it just to make her get off her back.
… …. …
Annoyance shifts into exasperation when the others think that whatever Lucy is doing is working and start following her example.
They look at her with a hope that she wants to shy away from, like Alex is somehow recovering from this.
They look at her with a wistful eagerness, as if they can help her escape this nightmare for any small amount of time.
At first, dropping by meals, then finding excuses to invite themselves inside and eat them with her.
Then, braver still, insisting they get her out of their apartment, back into the environment, into society.
And because Alex is polite and still has manners, she complies. Reluctantly.
Because they aren’t the ones she’s mad at, they aren’t the focus of that darkness in her heart, and they shouldn’t be the ones to suffer for it.
Besides it is easier to relent, than be under their watchful concern.
They have set schedules, so she is able to work her planning around their visits, but it’s smothering, the way they won’t give up.
Lucy doesn’t go away.
If anything, she becomes more emboldened.
She starts dragging them out to the drive-in after lunch on Mondays, something that old Lucy never would have done, to watch those black and white silver screen films that likely haven’t seen the light of day in decades.
On Tuesdays, M’gann picks her up for coffee and a bagel at Radu’s Coffee in Greenwich Village, where they talk about mundane things, avoiding anything that could even remotely relate to work, family, friends, or a personal life.
Every other day James starts appearing at the ass crack of dawn in his running gear. Cajoling her out of bed and into training for some nonexistent race, changing the route every time, until they’re running for miles and miles on the outskirts of the city, until they’re both too sweaty and out of breathe to speak, much less think.
On Fridays, Vasquez makes her go do something destructive. One time it was a kickboxing class, another time it is taking a baseball bat to an old car in the junkyard her brother owns, another time still, it’s the gun range. And with the solid, cool metal in her hands Alex realizes it’s the first time she’s held a gun in weeks.
It doesn’t feel as good as she remembered.
On Saturday nights, J’onn makes her dinner. He brings all the ingredients, some of which he grew in the garden himself, rummages through Alex’s cabinets for pots and pans that she herself hasn't been used in months and scrounges up a three-course meal that would make Gordon Ramsey jealous.
Sometimes he talks when he prepares the food, sometimes he is silent.
But his presence in the apartment intermingles with warm, savory aromas sifting through the air and makes the apartment seem a little less empty than before.
Barry is more sporadic, popping up in her apartment with little to no warning, and running her across the world to different places that aren’t National City. It’s none of the touristy places. Always quiet nature and solitude. Mountain trails, forests, a beach, some lakes, a sifting desert.
Because she needs a change of pace and the change of scenery, he insists.
A place that her wife and sister didn’t die in, he doesn’t say.
Clark’s visits are rarer than that because Lois is still pregnant on Argo.
But he comes, foreboding and sullen, and he has to decency not to wear his cape or his uniform when he does as the sit on her balcony and watch the sun set.
And they don’t talk.
Even before this, they hardly ever did.
Then Monday comes again.
And the cycle repeats itself.
… … ….
In the beginning it is hard.
Conversation is hard.
Smiling is hard.
Breathing is hard.
But with each passing day, something unwinds, minuscule, barely, but unwinds all the same.
And for some reason, she starts to find herself waiting for them to knock on her door.
For some reason, she doesn’t want them to go away.
It's gradual, even weird, how this all starts to change.
That her constant need for revenge somehow dulls to a throbbing ache.
And though the darkness remains, it’s… it’s different somehow.
It doesn’t fester like a molting infection like it used to.
It doesn’t feel like she’s standing on embers.
Sometimes, it still threatens to overtake her in the later hours, when she’s alone in a giant bed meant for two.
It overwhelms her sometimes, how much she can actively despise another person.
Other times, though, the emptiness doesn't seem so lonely and the bitterness doesn't seem as harsh while the betrayal doesn't feel as fresh.
Alex doesn't really know what to do with that.
… .. .. ..
One Sunday, Brainy shows up on her doorstep.
It is the first time she had seen him since that day.
It is the first time since she had shoved out at him.
Had tried to hit him.
Had tried.
Because he of all people should have seen it coming.
He is a man of probabilities with genius level intellect.
He, of all people, should have known.
And that day she had been angry at him, but today she can only look at him.
He’s in his human form with a bag of apples in one hand and a can of olives in the other.
“They said I should bring an offering of food.”
He’s as awkward as he’s ever been, but there is something wistful in his words.
Alex never knew his tone could go deeper than that steady monotone.
And she can’t be angry.
So she is polite.
And lets him inside.
… … …. …
When he leaves, Alex realizes that she hasn't opened up her notebooks all day.
She feels bad, guilty even, and starts to review the plan from the beginning with fresh eyes.
She sees flaws in her original plan. Weaknesses she hadn't even thought of.
And Alex Danvers has never been anything less than perfect.
She pulls out a new notebook and starts again, this time vowing to be more careful.
But there is a tug on her conscience that wasn't there the first time.
She tries to push it away.
Forces herself to focus.
And she returns to the plan.
… … … ...
Days later, when she is paying for her check at Radu’s Coffee, someone stops her.
It is a man, tall, with ginger hair curling ringlets over his ears.
His eyes are soft, his demeanor filled with pity.
'It's so good to see you can forgive and forget. You are an example to us all.'
The man says, resting a hand on her edge of her elbow.
Alex blinks, stricken, and her mouth opens for a reply that doesn’t come.
Forgiveness? That's something she's not sure if she will ever be capable of.
But forgetting?
What should she forget? Should she forget lazy Saturday mornings with her wife? Should she forget marveling at how many potstickers her sister could shove down her throat?
Should she forget that the best things about this miserable world were no longer a part of it?
Forget about her… the betrayal?
No. There would be no forgetting.
Only revenge.
Her story has been blasted through countless media outlets.
Part of it anyway.
She's a household name now.
And though her hair is longer, curlier since that day, though the news cycle has turned over more than a few times since, it isn’t a surprise that some of the public will still recognize her as Maggie Sawyer’s wife.
No one knows her relation to Supergirl.
And the death of Kara Danvers had barely been a cliff note.
It’s impossible to know whether it was better that way.
People have come up before and she had accepted their platitudes.
But this time she can’t swallow the lump around her throat, and lie, and say thank you.
This time the words are stuck.
‘Miss, are you okay?”
He asks.
Miss not Mrs.
And she realizes she hasn’t answered.
Alex jerks her arm away.
So hard that it hits the counter behind her.
But she barely feels it as she steps back into M’gann, who has reappeared from the restroom, demeanor full of concern, wondering what in the hell is happening.
And she can’t bring herself to meet any of their eyes.
… …
It's her and Maggie’s second anniversary.
Or at least it should have been.
Alex cradles their wedding photo in her hands.
Moves a finger to trace over Maggie’s olive skin, her silky black hair, the dimples in her cheek.
Her dress had been so beautiful.
She had been so beautiful.
And now she is gone.
Kara is gone.
And it's all her fault.
The betrayal is fresh again. It's so real she can almost taste it.
And Alex refuses to allow herself to wonder if she feels guilty.
That woman’s feelings shouldn't matter.
But still her mind wanders.
Is this day as hard for her?
Alex hopes so.
Alex hopes not.
She had been at their wedding.
She had congratulated them on the nuptials.
And she had made her a widow.
Alex wishes she had the answers.
But she doesn’t.
So instead, she blinks away her tears and returns to the plan with a weird taste in her mouth.
Maggie’s vows echo in her ear the entire time.
Finally, at around midnight, she takes a couple of sleeping pills and goes to bed for the first time in a while.
… … ..
“Have you gone… back?”
Clark asks quietly, the deep baritone of his voice rumbling over the small confines of the apartment.
He isn’t looking at her when he poses the question, his eyes trained on the setting sun in the bay window, but Alex knows what he’s talking about.
Their graves.
And she hasn’t been to their final resting places since she had laid that fistful of dirt on their hardwood coffins.
“No.”
She replies simply.
If she goes, she will cry.
And she doesn’t want to cry.
Not anymore.
“It might help.” He whispers. “For… for closure.”
… ….
Kara’s earth birthday comes, and she isn't sure how to feel.
Because the plan is done.
The plan is perfect.
No one will ever know if she doesn't want them to.
The problem is, she isn't sure what she wants anymore.
She can't explain this feeling inside her.
Because the darkness, the pit in her heart, it's still there and just as raw as the day it happened.
But… the idea of carrying out the plan…it doesn't provide the solace it used to.
Instead, it makes her feel empty in a different way.
Can she taint Maggie and Kara’s memory like this?
How can she not exact revenge?
She's torn. She literally feels as though she is torn in half.
Normally, she might confide in one of her friends, in J’onn maybe, but she knows that if they knew she had even thought about this in detail they would try and stop her.
And that's a whole different issue entirely.
Does she want them to stop her?
She's not sure.
She closes the notebook and grabs her keys before heading out of the house to meet Lucy for lunch.
And she hopes that the answers will come in time.
… .. … ...
They never do.
… … … …
Today is the anniversary of their…of her… of it.
And she thinks she knows what she wants to do.
But sitting here on the cold chair in an interrogation room at the federal prison, Alex can't help but
question herself when she walks in, hands cuffed in front of her.
Alex wants to smirk and wants to vomit at the same time.
Instead, she grinds her teeth together so hard, she can feel the tension tightening the muscles in her forehead.
How can she be so conflicted?
How can she hate her so much and feel sorry for her the same time?
"Alex."
Her companion breathes, sitting onto the chair across from her in a blue prison jumpsuit, still somewhat graceful, still elegant.
"I… I didn't think it was likely that you would ever come."
Alex takes a deep breath and tries to sort out her jumbling thoughts.
"I… I didn't think I would either."
She answers stiffly, and they fall into an uncomfortable silence, neither knowing what to say.
Alex is not sure what she wants from her.
What she’s doing now, wasn’t meticulously thought out like the plan she’d so carefully worked on, and whatever confidence she had, disappeared the second the other woman walked through those doors.
"I thought about how to kill you."
Alex admits finally, searching her companion’s face for a reaction.
But if she is surprised, her face doesn't show it, but she’d always had the tightly wound grip on her emotions, so after a moment of looking at carefully blasé features, Alex continues.
"I had it planned. How to make you hurt."
The words grate out of her throat, and the darkness that had dulled, pulses angrily back to life at her side.
"I am guessing that you decided against it."
Her eyes don’t meet hers, but Alex swears she hears a tilt of disappointment in her voice.
"Yeah." She breathes out. "They wouldn't want me to do it."
"No. They wouldn't."
The other woman agrees.
"You don't get to decide what they would have wanted!"
Alex spits, even when it doesn't make any sense because she’s agreeing with her, but she can't stand to ever think she knew them on any type of level, especially on one that allows her to speak for them.
"Then why are you here, Alex?"
She whispers, at last.
And she sounds so tired. So exhausted. So done.
"I just…” Alex frowns and the answer is thick and ugly as it crawls out of her throat. “I just... I want
to know why."
And she wants to be calm and cool and collected, but her throat dry clicks with emotion and the resulting crack betrays her lack of composure, betrays how she’s barely holding on.
Because this question has haunted her for the last year.
The question she doesn't know the answer to.
"I don't know."
The other woman replies, soft and unassuming.
"You don't know?" She spits incredulously. "You don't know why you kidnapped my wife? Why you held her for ransom? Why you stood by and said we were going to find her while your goons called and demanded I drain my life savings?"
"Alex, I d-"
"No! Let me finish, Lena!" She spits, the full venom spewing out of her. "You are a billionaire. You have fuck-you money. Buy an island money! And you orchestrated the kidnapping of Maggie for ransom. Do you know how ridiculous that is!”
The image of the inky-haired, emerald-eyed woman blurs around the edges as her voice raises, warbly and harsh, because now she has to finish, has to get it all off of her chest.
“Then y-you stood by and watched as you let us send my sister into a death trap!”
"I never meant for it to get that far. I—"
“Kara died! She died trying to rescue my wife who died anyway."
Alex chokes on her words, and she feels the tears running down her skin now, but she can’t bring herself to stifle them.
“A-Alex- she wasn’t supposed to die-”
Lena stutters over her words and there is palpable regret in her tone, but all Alex can hear are the false consolations she’d murmured all those months ago.
“Who wasn’t supposed to die, Lena! Who? Kara? When you gave your men bullets made of synthetic kryptonite? Or Maggie, when you told them it didn’t matter where they aimed?”
“Neither! I swear. It... It... I m-made calculations- it w-wasn’t supposed to- something must have been off that day I-”
In a way, Lena is right, Kara had been flirting on the edge of a solar flare in the weeks leading up to her death, operating at maybe eighty-five percent capacity.
Alex had only discovered this when the extraction team had dragged her bloodied, unconscious form into the DEO operating room and hooked her up to all those goddamn machines as she tried to save her life.
But she isn’t going to sit here and listen to Lena try to justify how she only meant to almost kill Kara.
It shouldn’t have been a calculation.
It shouldn’t have been a thing at all.
“Don’t. Just don’t.”
She mutters cutting her off.
“She… she saved you so many times. Kara fought for you, Lena. She believed in you. Loved you even. And I know she didn’t tell you about the truth. But she didn’t tell J’onn. She didn’t tell Cat. She didn’t tell M-Maggie. And…. and… yet- you’re the only one- you’re the only one- who-”
Their broken bloodied bodies flash by in her mind, choking her words off, welling up sharply with a sickening torrent of nausea that pulls her stomach up to her throat, and drags her heart somewhere below her knees.
“I’m sorry.”
Alex slams her fists on the table, and it vibrates with the force.
“Sorry won’t bring them back!”
It won’t.
It won’t.
She won’t ever see Maggie smile again.
She won’t ever hear Kara laugh again.
"You disgust me!"
Alex shoots to her feet, unable to breathe the same air as her any longer.
"But I am done thinking about you. I am done wasting any part of my life even thinking of your name. I can't—I don't even care what happens to you."
Lena looks at her, directly in her eyes for the first time since she walked in.
“I… I never meant for anyone to get hurt. You… you can't blame me any more than I blame myself."
She whispers and Alex laughs.
She laughs, and it's just as harsh and ugly as she’d imagined it would be.
"I can blame you, and I do." She moves around the table and stalks toward the door. "And I hope you see their faces every night, because their faces are all that I can see. And the horrible thing is...I guess I was right. And it doesn’t feel good that I was.”
She pauses, rubs her hand across the face, to wipe the tears away.
“Once a Luthor always a Luthor.”
And she doesn’t look back.
… …. …
She visits their graves.
Alone.
The grass is soft. The sky is blue. The air crisp.
Calm and unassuming.
They would have liked it.
Alex eyes burn as she lowers herself between the two headstones and pulls out the notebooks that had her plan had taken residence in all those days, weeks, and months.
The darkness is like a splinter now.
Noticeable, but not debilitating.
And not nearly enough to warrant this disgusting, horrifying idea.
In tough minutes, she works at the pages until her master plan is nothing but tiny little pieces of white that flutter away in the wind.
When it’s done only the black plastic spirals remain.
Her hands drift over the marble, smooth and soft, and when the lump appears in her throat, she doesn’t try to swallow it.
Instead, she cries.