Chapter Text
“You will have the magic that you need.”
It’s what everyone was told. Students learned it, internalized it. Children waited with bated breath, the magic to come so often a sign of what life would bring them. There were the future teachers gifted the ability to see flows of information like tangible strings connecting them to others. The would-be athletes whose bones and muscles and ligaments could knit themselves back together. The doctors and healers who could see inside the body, track the workings of organs and cells. Those given the art of divination. Others still who could breathe underwater, see in the blackest of nights, sense lies and half-truths, find their way home from anywhere in the world. Children learned these stories, learned to see their magic as a gift, to intuit their life’s purpose from it. Magic was a blessing. The universe saw what a child needed, and the universe would provide.
Only, not everyone agreed. At least not at first.
Some found they needed to wrestle with their supposed gifts, had to come to terms with what the universe meant by them. Their magic was not so straightforward as a firefighter with lungs made invulnerable to smoke, with skin made to withstand the lick of flames suffocating the very air around them. These kinds of people were not talked about in school. Their stories did not appear in children’s books. Messy is what they were deemed, and no one, they said, needs to hear those sorts of stories.
And yet, dear reader, our story brings us to two such women. Two women who felt themselves cursed instead of blessed, who spent years rebelling against that which they had been gifted. Let us glance in at them now.
---
Disgust. Curiosity. Revulsion. Fear. Confusion. Anger.
The feelings pressed in around Maggie Sawyer and made her head swim and her stomach churn. She pushed the remnants of her sandwich back into her lunch bag and slipped out of the cafeteria, down the hallways, and into the dusty old library. Mrs. Greely nodded at her, then looked back down at the book in her lap.
The world quieted, the air around Maggie growing thin enough for her to breathe once more. Mrs. Greely’s emotions shifted slowly, matching the pace of whatever novel was in her lap at the time, and rarely did they respond to Maggie. There had been the errant notes of interest, of confusion, of pity the week she’d sported a black eye, but little more. Just the way Maggie liked it.
She settled herself in the corner, back wedged between the card catalogue and the wall, eyes watching the doorway for any signs of movement. Only then did she pull her lunch back out, eating while she could stomach it. The rest of the period was spent walking through the aisles of books, skimming passages and dwelling with characters that spoke nothing more to her than what was on the page. And for those moments, she let herself be.
---
Across the country, Alex Danvers felt the molecules of her body giving way, shifting out, expanding until she filled the room, then the hallway, then the house, blocking out all the light and sounds and smells of the outside world and blanketing their little world in the kind of quiet stillness they so rarely had. She felt Kara’s sudden relief like something tangible in the air. She sensed as her mother finally drifted into sleep, Alex’s body leeching the nightmares from her, holding the terror and anger and deep, deep grief in abeyance as the house finally settled.
Alex centered herself in the living room, sat with her father’s portrait, glared at the empty urn they had been given, the empty urn that provided no closure, no satisfaction, no end to this interminable grief stretching out in front of them all.
Not that Alex could end the grief either. No, she could only make herself into some kind of bandage for it—never healing, only papering over. This failure felt right, resonated with those cold, dark places inside of her that told her she wasn’t enough, would never be enough. Here was the universe itself telling her that the very best thing she could do would be to become anything other than what she was. Not that the universe had gifted this power to her on time. No, it had come only after Kara had been caught, after her father had been taken to the job that would become his death warrant. She became a balm to soothe the hurts she hadn’t prevented. Nothing more.
Alex sank deeper and deeper into this expansion until she nearly was no more. Until her thoughts had spread themselves so thin across her molecules that she could barely hold onto them, slipping like water through a sieve. And finally, she let herself rest.
---
“You must be sure.”
Maggie blinked up at the old man—a wizard, he called himself, the kind of title that had fallen out of favor centuries ago. “I am.”
“The universe does not grant magic beyond what it has provided.”
Maggie crossed her arms over her chest, glared up at him with all the fire and anger she could muster. “The universe didn’t provide shit.” All it had done was spit in her face, “gift” her the knowledge of just how reviled she was, how little she was wanted by anyone around her.
“You must be sure,” he repeated.
“I am,” she spat back at him.
He gave her a solemn nod, then reached out, his wrinkled hands landing on her shoulders.
For a long moment, there was nothing but silence pressing in all around them.
And then Maggie felt a tug from somewhere deep inside of her, a tug that gave way to white-hot pain, as if whatever was being pulled from her had sunk its claws in, determined not to leave.
“Your power is strong,” the old man grunted. “You could do great things.”
“Take it!” Maggie closed her eyes against the pain, curling her hands into fists, nails digging into the soft flesh of her palms.
The door crashed open behind her, and suddenly the man’s hands were gone, Maggie’s whole body trembling as her magic settled itself even deeper into her bones.
“Come with me, Maggie.”
Maggie looked up, blinked at the unexpected sight of Mrs. Greely framed in the doorway, lit only by the flickering streetlamps behind her.
“She wished it gone.”
“Yet the future requires it there.” Mrs. Greely held out a hand to Maggie. “Come, my dear, the future will have what the future requires.”
Maggie ground her teeth together, tears stinging at her eyes. “I thought my magic was supposed to be a gift for me.”
“It is. It will be. Your magic is what you need. And some of you are what the universe needs.”
“The universe can go fu—”
“Just because we are off of school grounds does not mean I won’t give you a demerit, Ms. Sawyer.”
“I’m 18.”
“And?”
“I don’t have to stay in school anymore.”
“Perhaps. But—”
“What? The universe requires me to graduate?”
Mrs. Greely shrugged one slightly hunched shoulder. “No. But it’ll sure make getting out of this small town easier.”
Maggie opened her mouth, then closed it. Sighed heavily. “Fine.”
---
Away at school, Alex learned her magic’s limits.
She could be what someone needed, but not for everyone. She had to love them, care enough to give of herself, to put her body on the line.
At home it had seemed so simple. There was no question of her becoming what her mother needed, what Kara needed.
At school, alone and isolated, Alex felt that part of herself close down, felt her magic pull further and further away from her grasp, receding somewhere deep inside of her.
She did not learn how very real those limits were, how necessary that sense of love and care were, until it was her own life on the line, and her magic simply would not respond.
Sitting in a jail cell, rapidly sobering under the blinking fluorescent lights, Alex found herself confronted with a strange man who seemed to know her already. He called himself J’onn, called himself a friend.
“You’ve been hurting for a long time, Alex,” he said, his voice deep and comforting. “It’s time for you to heal now.”
“The universe didn’t give me that,” Alex muttered, her gaze downcast.
“Sometimes we don’t know what the universe intends.”
“Really? Because it seems pretty fucking clear to me.”
He gave her a soft, sad smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Some things become clear only with time.”
“Are you just here to talk in riddles? Because I think I can live without that.”
“I’m here to offer you a way out.”
She glanced up at him. “Of the cell?”
“First that, yes. But I want you to work with me. Think of it as an apprenticeship.”
“In what?”
“Let’s call it healing.”