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School was something Alex had always loved, strange as it may sound.
The fact that most of her teachers would always insist on calling her Alexandra aside, there was little about school that young Alex Danvers did not enjoy.
From the very first day she stepped into first grade, only to have the teacher send her to the principal’s office with a note saying that she belonged in a higher grade, she knew she would be good at it.
From the very first day she stepped into school hand in hand with her younger sister, she knew she wanted more than anything to be able to show Kara the world. Her world.
They were inseparable, even by the grades that divided them. Kara knew every secret to the school that Alex had figured out by the time she had entered, and Alex never let anyone do anything untoward to her little sister. Not on her watch.
And yet, the first time she was pulled out of a class because Kara had accidentally pulled a bully off another student in the cafeteria too hard, Alex had begun to fear that even her safe haven would soon be overtaken by her sister.
“Alexandra Danvers, please report to the principal’s office immediately. I repeat, Alexandra Danvers, please report to Principal Loy’s office immediately.”
As the announcement played over the PA system, Alex immediately flushed a bright scarlet, the colour burning all the way to the tips of her ears.
Her hands shook as she washed the test tubes that she had been working with, cleaning her bench top and muttering a swift apology to her lab partner, Maria. Slipping the last of her stationery into her haversack, Alex nodded at her Chemistry teacher and sprinted out of the laboratory.
A million possibilities of what had gone wrong ran through her mind, and yet Alex could not for the life of her figure out what could have warranted a call to the principal’s office.
Yes, she was a mischievous daredevil, but above all she was a good student. She was never reckless enough to do anything that might get her caught and for disciplinary action to be doled out.
God, had something happened to her parents?
That was impossible, she tried to rationalise, they would have called for Kara as well, if that were the case.
Unless something had happened to Kara.
Goodness.
After some eternity of running down seemingly endless hallways and making an inane number of turns through the corridors, Alex finally found herself staring down the pale brown wood of the door of Principal Loy’s office.
Knocking twice, Alex waited for the voice of her principal to grant her entrance before she dared touch the handle of the door and push it open.
“Come in, Alexandra, and close the door behind you,” Principal Loy beckoned her in.
“Alex,” She stammered out, “I prefer to be called Alex, Principal Loy.”
“Alright then, Alex,” Principal Loy spoke once more, gesturing towards the chair in front of her, “Please take a seat next to young Kara here.”
It was only then that Alex became aware of her sister’s presence in the room.
Immediately Alex gave Kara a once-over, sweeping her gaze across her sister’s form to check for any visible physical injury or trauma. Only once that immediate concern had been assuaged did Alex do as she was told and sit herself down before the principal.
“Alex, I’m sorry to pull you out of class, but there has been an… altercation, so to speak,” Principal Loy began hesitantly, “I understand that your parents are out of town for a scientific conference, and so we had no choice but to call you in from your class. I’m sure Mr. Isai will allow you to make up for your incomplete lab session another time.”
“What happened?” Alex immediately asked, her throat tight.
If she got into a fight, someone might have realised how different she was.
“I was just trying to stop him–” Kara protested weakly, clenching her fists.
Principal Loy nodded her head in calm understanding, before turning back to Alex, “There was a bullying situation during the earlier middle school recess. Young Kara here decided to step in to put a stop to it. Unfortunately, I think she underestimated her own strength; she accidentally pulled Henry Carson and shoved him into the trash bin.”
If they know how different she is, they may take her away.
“What is going to happen to her?” Alex questioned.
“It was all in good intention,” Principal Loy admitted understandingly, “But the school does not tolerate violence. She will have detention for the week, after school each day. You’ll have to pick her up since your parents are away.”
“That sounds fair,” Alex sighed, “Thank you, Principal Loy. I promise this won’t happen again.”
If can’t happen again. It’s too much of a risk. We can’t lose her. I can’t lose her.
“May we return to class now?” Kara murmured quietly.
“You may,” Principal Loy acquiesced, “Thank you for coming here, Alex. Stay out of trouble, both of you.”
Nodding solemnly at Principal Loy, Alex took Kara by the hand and pulled her out of the office.
“God, Kara,” Alex whispered, exasperated, “You’ve got to be careful. What if something worse had happened? The last thing I want is for anyone to take you away from us. Please, Kara, be careful.”
She loved Kara, that was undeniable, but school had always been the one place where she could be Alex Danvers, not just Kara’s sister.
For a week or so, she allowed herself to stew in her newfound anger.
She took to the ropes harder and faster than she ever had before, during Phys. Ed, reaching the top and ringing the bell at a startlingly faster speed than anyone else in her class. She wrote her essays in half the time she usually did, allowing the scratching of her pen against paper as words poured out too quickly for her to stem their flow.
She spent twice as much time in the library as she usually did, poring over endless pages of scientific texts that most of the high schoolers neglected to touch and committing as much of it to memory as possible.
After that week, she was back to being Kara’s protector.
Every morning she reminded Kara about the things that she had to be wary not to do, to not expose herself or to put herself in any danger.
Even though they were four grades apart (but two years apart in age), she sat with Kara during lunch every day, thankful for the combined structure of the middle and high schools. If push came to shove, she could handle the bullying situations that Kara felt so compelled to step into.
At least she knew how much damage she could do, and she could control it.
After all, she would sooner allow disciplinary action to land on her (spotless) permanent record than for Kara to be punished for something she could hardly control nor explain.
Graduating, even as valedictorian, and leaving Kara behind was hard, but Alex Danvers never stood by while her own dreams passed her by. Not even for her baby sister.
As much as she loved Kara, she knew that the both of them had to become their own people.
Kara would hate for her to have given up the university course of her dreams only to hang around to protect her.
“I’m an alien, ‘Lex,” She would protest vehemently, “With superpowers on a planet that makes me virtually indestructible. I’ll be fine. Go chase your dreams.”
When she left National City, Alex threw herself into her work. Every lab, every lecture, she made it an absolute certainty she did her best. After all, Alexandra Danvers never accepted anything less than that.
She chopped her long auburn curls off into a sleek bob, swapped her glasses for contact lenses (if only because this made lab work infinitely more convenient) and put everything into making sure that she would go as far as she could based on her own merit.
What most people did in four years, Alex Danvers accomplished in two.
She called Kara the day she got confirmation of her early graduation, squealing over the phone to her younger sister who was swiftly finishing her high school career.
Every minute, every hour and every day she had spent hunched over her books or stuck in the lab had been worth the looks on her family’s faces and the pride in her parents’ voices when they had hugged her as tightly as they could (well, not quite as tightly as Kara could) after she walked across the stage to receive her degree.
Her speech had made her parents cry, and Kara looked at her for the first time in years with such a look of adoration that Alex almost could not make it through to the last line of her speech:
“The stars we are given, my little sister once told me, but the constellations we make. As we all walk off this stage and onto the vast arena that is life itself, I hope every single one of us will make of what the world throws at us the constellations that we’ve always dreamed of.”
Alex was all too aware of the differences between her and Kara.
Kara had the free-spirited, reckless optimism that Alex could never understand, let alone adopt. Stubborn, headstrong and passionate, Alex had often found herself envious of the way in which Kara could just launch herself into things wholeheartedly without a shred of contemplation for the consequences thereof.
Alex, on the other hand. By her very nature she was practical. Where Kara would leap tall buildings in a single bound (superpowers notwithstanding), Alex knew to build bridges with an efficiency and accuracy like no other.
There was a reason that Alex had ended up working with the D.E.O, rather than Kara.
No chain of authority could hold her sister down. No weapon or chemical could keep her at bay.
There was a reason that Alex never shied away from the job she had been offered, in spite of countless other opportunities that had presented themselves to her after her early graduation. Hell, she had just been through Harvard Med, and for it she had turned down an internship at Johns Hopkins.
When Henshaw approached her the minute her parents and sister had left campus, just as she was headed back to her dorm to pack, she saw a chance to work a job that played to her strengths, and allowed her to make up for Kara’s weaknesses.
After all, no one knew her sister better than she did.
At this point, Alex had made her peace with the sheer degree to which her life was intertwined with Kara’s. Taking the D.E.O’s offer, working to protect the Earth and to protect Kara, none of that meant that she was any less her own person than she would have been if not for the presence of her younger sister.
Pushing her hair back with one hand, Alex slid a finger under the flap of the envelope that enclosed within itself her new badge for the Department of Extra-Normal Operations.
Her sister would be a hero in her own time.
As much as Alex wished that she would be able to keep Kara safe and well away from the life that Kal-El lead, Kara had too much of the heart of a hero to simply stand by and allow someone else to save the people of the world she had come to view as her own, in part.
With this badge, Alex would be a hero in her own right as well.
The fact that she could keep an eye on her sister, well, that was just a perk of the job.