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“Are you good, Supergirl?”
It doesn’t feel out of place anymore, to assess the damage done in the after big fights like these.
It isn’t dubious like after she first started dating Alex and realized who Kara really was.
Nor is it awkward, like after the big break up and they were both unsure where the other stood.
Established now, it is an experienced necessity. Having sped through the phases of life, the label has changed from more than just acquaintances now or her ex-fiance’s little sister or even coworkers. Friends, able to be civil with each other, even with how things had ended, and God knows how long it took to get there.
Friends. And friends looked out for each other.
So exhausted, the detective lowers herself down onto the mahogany park bench that’d had the audacity to survive the whole ordeal, and asks the question.
“Are you?”
Kara rebuts hoarsely, in true Danvers fashion, like pebbled glass isn’t glittering under the moonlight in her crimson-streaked blonde hair, like purpling bruises aren’t blooming on her skin, like the detective isn’t asking a perfectly reasonable question.
The blonde tilts her head, without waiting for an answer, the grayish red of her cape rustling as she squints her eyes at the smaller detective.
Cheater.
“I’m fine.”
Maggie says anyway.
And she is. Really. Just gray. Dusty from all the plaster snow.
And maybe a whole world of soreness tomorrow morning, when the pain from the first hit really sets in.
The blonde doesn’t hum an acknowledgement, only stares harder. It would have been unnerving if Maggie hadn’t known the why of it all. But apparently, after another beat or two passes, Kara hasn’t found what she’s looking for.
“Your powers?”
Maggie asks lightly, when Kara huffs in frustration, her left hand, the less visibly injured one, snaking up to rub her temple.
The heroine only offers half a shrug, eyes flitting back towards the remnants of catastrophe.
The detective doesn’t pile on the pressure. Instead she follows the younger woman’s gaze, letting her bone creak and sore muscles unwind, as she forces herself to relax into the bench.
The ad interim.
It’s something that’s never talked about.
After the immediate danger is extinguished. After the crowd dissipates. After the cameras stop rolling.
The silence of it all.
Watching the CSI Clean Up Team scrape the street together into something a little more presentable.
The yellow police tape that flutters in the wind, sectioning off what is left.
The disarray from the destruction.
“Might have put a little too much on the plate this time.”
Kara says after a while, the reddish-blue of the remaining police vehicles bouncing off their faces.
A little? Try a lot.
Superheroes like Kara don’t bleed.
Not unless something is wrong.
Like with Reign.
And Maggie has to swallow hard to push that memory back all the way back into the depths where it belongs.
“The plate does seem pretty full… Do you need me to call Alex? Or the DEO?”
The detective is sure that sun lamps would at least take the edge off, if not straighten the fingers on that hand that look a little too crooked, but Kara answers indirectly, mind caught in whirling thoughts.
“It’s nice to remember sometimes…”
“Nice to remember what?”
“To remember how it feels...”
The blonde’s words flicker out like a distracted dream, dampened only by exhaustion as the last of the flames peter out. Even when her tone isn’t wistful, isn’t shaded in self-loathing, or weighed down with any other type of inward hatred, the detective’s stomach twists itself into knots.
It’s like Kara hadn’t realized the gravity of the admission.
On some level, Maggie had always known the ferocity of power the blonde weld.
How in a different time where they’d almost been sisters-in-law, there’d been a conversation in which the blonde explained she had to focus when it came to scaling back certain powers.
It’d been in response to someone asking about heightened hearing in the metropolis that was National Hearing. And at the time, Maggie assumed, maybe the whole X-ray vision thing, seeing through people, and all that.
She’d never once thought about strength.
It unleashes a barrage of intrusive thoughts.
A God in a paper town.
How does one manage?
It provides a thinly veiled glance into something past Supergirl. Past Kara Danvers.
Something else entirely.
And how much of someone does anyone really know?
Maggie hums, in lieu of what else to say, because what does one even say after that?
“It’ll fix itself. In the morning.”
Kara gestures emptilty at the sky, to where the sun wasn’t, but would be in the coming hours, in idle explanation, but the detective doesn’t know how much of that is the truth.
It was hard to get a good read on someone who’s lived so many lives.
“Do you want a ride?”
Maggie murmurs, a sudden overwhelming urge to do something, anything, at least, but Kara’s not listening again. Lost in the motions.
“Hey!” Kara looks at Maggie, her eyes still far away. “Do you need a ride?”
The blonde blinks once. Twice.
Then the heroine turns on a swivel, as if she’s just now realizing that they’re on the very edge of city limits and that she is no longer in the position where she can fly.
“I don’t want to go to the DEO.”
Kara says in a non-answer.
“I didn’t ask that.”
The blonde is silent for a long moment, some internal struggle warring just barely beneath the surface. Like she doesn't want to ask for help.
“Sure.” Kara murmurs at last. “Can you drop me off at my apartment?”
It isn’t missed on the detective that Kara doesn’t say home.
“Of course.” Maggie says. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Whenever that would be.