Chapter Text
Incredible Cover Art by dan17
Maggie listened to the rhythmic tick of the engine as the unmarked police Charger slowly cooled. She'd been sitting there for what felt like an eternity, flexing her grip on the steering wheel while watching the comings and goings of the bar's patrons. Her heart raced with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension, her mind wrestling to get her body to get out of the car, cross the street, and enter the bar. She hadn't been back to the bar in more than a year — 389 days, to be exact — and if it weren't for the phone call from N'orsha, Maggie wasn't sure she'd be there now. But it was bigger than her still shattered heart.
Memories of happier times with Alex and their friends clouded her mind, threatening to engulf her as she stared at the heavy wooden door, but tonight wasn't about that, and she had to constantly remind herself that it didn't matter if Alex was inside or if Kara was seated at the bar with Winn and James. None of that was important. There were dozens of aliens missing, some of them her friends, and the one thing they had in common was that the bar was the last place anyone had seen them.
N'orsha's call had come as a surprise. They'd only met once or twice before M'gann returned to Mars, leaving N'orsha in charge of the bar, but the White Martian had reached out, calling the precinct and begging the desk officer to transfer her to Detective Sawyer or, at the very least, take a message. When Maggie found the yellow Post-it note stuck to her keyboard, she'd called immediately, arranging to meet the frightened bartender at a nearby coffee shop.
Only a few hours later, she found N'orsha seated at a booth near the back of the shop with Darla across from her. Maggie hesitated for just a moment before sliding in next to her one-time on-again, off-again fling.
For the next 45 minutes, she listened as the Roltikkon and White Martian told her about the nearly two dozen aliens who had simply vanished. Maggie scribbled notes as she listened, filling three pages, but when all was said and done, neither N'orsha nor Darla had given her nearly enough information to run with. If she brought her scribbled notes to her captain, he would have laughed her out of the precinct. A handful of missing aliens was the least of his concerns. Attitudes had changed, but only slightly. Few of her fellow officers cared about the alien community unless, of course, they'd committed a crime.
She promised the two aliens she'd look into it and hadn't missed the frown and irritated glare Darla shot in her direction.
"It's the least you can do, Mags," she informed her flatly.
Darla didn't need to say it. Her tone said plenty: Maggie had abandoned them.
Maggie knew she had. The guilt had washed over her as soon as she'd seen N'orsha's urgent note stuck to her keyboard. And as the duo laid out the story, the guilt bubbled back to the surface. She wished she could have been better, stronger, for her friends, but she'd chickened out. Maybe she could have prevented all of this from happening if she'd had the courage to deal with her own shit and stick around. She wasn't already good, but she'd gotten good at pretending.
And hopefully, they understood. Everyone else seemed to recognize the spiral Maggie had fallen into.
Her world had shattered. Exploded, really, and it came out of nowhere. One moment, she was deliriously happy, rapidly approaching exchanging vows with the love of her life, and the next, she was walking down the street with a backpack, considering whether to actually crash on a friend's couch or rent a motel room. Her first instinct had been to slide the mask she'd been carefully constructing since her teen years back into place and lean into self-preservation. She didn't know how to act like her world hadn’t stopped turning. The last time it had happened, she was 14, and she'd shut down completely. Started again. It worked then, and it had worked 389 days ago, too. A new yoga studio, a new gym, a new path for her morning jogs, a new grocery store and coffee shop, and no more trips to the alien bar.
The alien bar wasn't just a haven for off-worlders, for those who looked different than their human counterparts. It had been her safe place, too. But she'd introduced the place to Alex and her sister and their friends, and Maggie couldn't bring herself to return. It wasn't her place anymore. She shouldn't have surrendered it so easily, but Maggie wasn't sure she could stomach seeing Alex singing karaoke or smiling or laughing. It was better to just surrender the bar.
Besides, it wasn't like she had a lot of spare time on her hands anymore. In the year since the breakup, Maggie had buried herself in work, clocking so many overtime hours her captain had threatened to suspend her if she didn't start using some PTO. But she needed the money more than she needed to keep herself busy.
When it all came crashing down, Maggie wanted to just disappear. Early in their friendship, she'd offered to do just that. But now, failed engagement behind her, it wasn't that easy. Where would she go? And with what money? They'd flushed so much of it when they started calling the venue and the florist and the caterer. At the time, she'd assured Alex she didn't care about the money, but that $10,000 would have been nice in her bank account.
That first night, she'd taken herself to a hotel. It was surprisingly easy to lie to Alex that she was staying with a friend. She knew that if Alex knew she really had nowhere to go, her now ex-fiancee would insist she stay. And she couldn't do that. She couldn't stay there and pretend everything was fine. In the relative comfort and solitude of the hotel room, she'd lost her cool, drinking glass after glass of scotch before beginning the search for a new place to live — someplace she could afford with the meager remains of her savings.
That place was tiny and on a kinda shitty side of town, but there were four walls, hot water, and the doors locked. The plus side to that side of town was that there was little danger of running into Alex or any of their friends. But after a few months of picking up every opportunity for overtime, she'd managed to put together enough to move somewhere nicer. That didn't mean the overtime stopped. Maggie threw herself into work. If she kept busy, it was easy to forget that yet one more person who promised forever had so easily thrown her away.
Sitting in the Charger, Maggie wished she'd at least found time to check in at the bar. If she'd checked in, maybe none of this would have happened. But it had, and she vowed to do everything she could to fix things and bring the missing aliens home.
So she dug in.
It didn't take much to start connecting the dots. Anyone cop could have done it, but Maggie knew that just because anyone could have didn't mean her fellow NCPD officers would. Alien amnesty or not, most people still didn't care about their alien neighbors. Unless, of course, they were blond, pretty, and wore an S on their chest.
For the next few weeks, Maggie worked the case quietly in her off time, chasing down leads and asking questions. Before she could even ask to pursue it officially, she needed something more than N'orsha's concerns that "a bunch of regulars have stopped coming in." And two days ago, she found the piece that gave her the official green light.
Art by dan17
There was that alien encampment on the other side of the town where her post-breakup hotel was. She'd visited it a few times earlier in her NCPD career, making friends with several families that had made their homes under the bridge. Her visits had tapered off once she found the bar, but not much had changed. The diverse tapestry of aliens was evident in the patchwork of tents and makeshift structures that had taken root there. Tall and elegant Naltorians gathered in one group nearest the bridge, their conversation echoing off the steel bridge supports. A group of Draagaans huddled around makeshift cooking fires while a soft, bioluminescent glow painted the entire camp from where a small group of Lumarians was playing some kind of card game that Maggie didn't immediately recognize.
Maggie had watched the scattered groups silently from a distance before making her approach. There were fewer aliens than her last visit, and while Maggie hoped their ranks had diminished because some had found jobs and permanent homes, she knew that wasn't the case.
A Durlan spotted her first, freezing in mid-shapeshift. Humans rarely came to the bridge, and when they did, it was frequently trouble, but the alien didn't seem worried. A look of surprise crossed his face before he waved to the Lumarians.
"The alien groupie is here," he called and then turned his attention back to Maggie. "Long time, Detective."
Maggie bowed her head in apology and made her way to where the aliens had rapidly formed a large circle, each chattering at once at her. Raising her hand, she'd finally managed to get them to redirect their attention.
"There were more of us," a Naltorian told her, gesturing to their reduced numbers. "Only a few months ago, we were nearly 50 —"
"And then they came," a Draagan Maggie recognized from the bar interrupted.
"Who came?"
"The men in the black vans."
The aliens couldn't tell her much except that the vans seemed to make their rounds every few weeks, following unsuspecting aliens down dark alleys and, from time to time, driving right into the tent city and taking whoever didn't run away fast enough. The men in the vans had gotten more brave, snatching up entire families in broad daylight. There were rumors, of course, of where the kidnapped aliens were taken and for what reason. They were certain their friends and family members were being kidnapped and sold into some kind of slavery. Some of the aliens insisted that their brothers and children would have made every effort to break free but must have been brainwashed — reprogrammed, the Draagan insisted — and then sold to the highest bidder.
At first, Maggie had taken it with a grain of salt.
Nevertheless, she asked around at the precinct's traffic division for reports of suspicious black vans and had come up empty. As she returned to her desk, though, one of the beat guys had caught her by the coffee maker and told her he'd heard her asking the traffic cops about black vans. He didn't know about suspicious black vans, but he did know something. Jensen, according to his name tag, said that he'd been called out to an Enterprise car rental about six months earlier. Someone had broken into the secure parking lot, and four large panel vans were stolen. They hadn't been recovered. The vans were white, but, Jensen said, maybe it was a lead.
"A bucket of paint ain't cost shit," he said with a casual shrug as he filled his mug with some of the precinct's burnt coffee.
There hadn't been a lot of leads for those missing panel vans, but it was a piece. Security cameras had captured grainy images of a group of men wearing identical gray jumpsuits and ski masks breaking into the lot and hotwiring the vans. It was impossible to identify them. Every identifiable mark had been covered, but they were muscular and tall, moving with well-trained precision. It was obviously not their first rodeo.
One morning, while jogging along the waterfront, she'd come to an abrupt stop, the pieces of the puzzle farther snapping into place. A Krell was standing beside a man sitting on a bench and talking rapidly on the phone. The Krell stood slightly hunched, hands behind his back, and his gaze downward as he waited for the man to end his conversation. He then offered a hand as the man got up and trailed behind him as the man headed toward a nearby black town car. The Krell hurried to open the door and then slipped into the driver's seat.
Maggie watched the car pull away from the curb before grabbing her phone and snapping a picture of the departing license plate. If aliens were really being kidnapped and sold, then the best way in would be to pose as a buyer.
She knew she should have called J'onn or Alex or anyone at the DEO. The case was getting too big. Call it pride, but she refused to make that phone call. Instead, she ran the license plate through the computer mounted in her cruiser and located the owner, Charles Wallace. A few days later, she managed to "bump into" the man she'd seen at the park at a nearby coffee shop. The Krell accompanied him, kneeling beside him on the floor, and Maggie fell into character, talking to Wallace about his assistant and expressing her interest in "hiring" someone for herself.
"It's not that difficult," Charles had drawled as he dug out a business card from his suit jacket. He set it on the table and tapped it with an exquisitely manicured finger. "It's quite expensive, but not difficult. Alien assistants will be the new thing before long. If you can afford it, there's a sale coming up. Call this gentleman, if you can call him that, and he'll help you shop for the intergalactic assistant of your dreams."
Maggie nearly ran back to her Triumph. She raced back to the precinct and wrote up a report as quickly as possible before banging on her captain's office door and begging for just a minute of his time. He read her report silently before motioning for her to close the door and asking her dozens of follow-up questions.
Now, sitting outside the alien bar, she watched as customer after customer knocked, whispered the password, and slipped inside. If her plan had worked, the kidnappers would be showing up soon for a meeting.
Her captain had signed off on the undercover assignment and sent her off to tactical for wardrobe and a disguise.
"You're too damn recognizable at that fucking alien hangout," he'd admonished her.
The sellers had quickly agreed to a meeting but insisted on texting the location to a burner phone 15 minutes before each meeting. The first meeting was in a vacant parking lot on the outskirts of the city. The three men appeared as if out of nowhere, with no vehicle anywhere in sight. She was patted down and her identification snatched from her pocket. Photos were taken, and Maggie was sent away. Two days later, the burner vibrated with a new text and a new location. She'd passed whatever background check they'd performed, and she was invited to a second meeting to discuss her "needs."
After a week of jumping through hoops, Brown, the seeming leader of the group, invited Maggie to the "meat market" to browse the selection. She instantly recognized the address: the alien bar.
Sitting in her driver's seat, Maggie took a deep breath and unfastened her seatbelt. The sellers would be there soon, and they were expecting to find their buyer at a corner booth.