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Alex is twenty seven when she almost dies. As almost-dying goes, this isn’t actually the closest she’s come to dying. A commercial flight about to crash into the Pacific doesn’t have nearly the same immediacy as, say, a knife biting into your throat in Tibet three days after being taken hostage, for example. But still, she’s at peace with it. Maybe the pilot will manage to make a safe landing, or maybe she’ll die on impact. She’ll die without ever telling Kara or her mom what she really does all day, but she’s okay with that. They have enough burdens of their own, they don’t need hers too. So, while it isn’t ideal, she closes her eyes and braces for impact.
The impact doesn’t come. Instead, the plane levels off and lands gently in the water off the coast of National City.
Instead, her baby sister decides to reveal herself to the entire world as a super-powered alien, and Alex isn’t sure she prefers this to death. She hasn’t spent her entire life working to protect Kara, she insists a few weeks later, but it feels like it sometimes. And in that moment, where Kara sacrifices her safety for Alex’s life, Alex feels like every sacrifice she has made up to this point was for nothing.
Kara’s put a symbol on her chest and a target on her back. Within the first week Kara proves Alex’s fears right: no amount of DEO help can protect someone who outmatches them in every way and equates the number of people protected with her self-worth. After a week of fighting her on it, Alex says nothing but “I’m proud of you,” because that’s what it takes to keep Kara by her side, her only chance of keeping her safe.
—
Alex is twenty eight the first time Kara almost dies. The first time she watches her sister’s vitals crash, this time because of a Black Mercy. Even the name stings; where is the mercy for the people left behind as their loved ones slip away into perfect dreams? It isn’t here, in this sterile medbay. If one more of her fellow agents shoots one of those pitying gazes through the glass, Alex’s fist is going to give them something more personal to worry about.
Alex can follow the trail from the Black Mercy, back to Non and Astra, who only are after Kara because of the threat she poses, who is only a threat to them because she became Supergirl, which only happened because Alex was on that plane. If Alex hadn’t been on that plane, Kara wouldn’t be unconscious on a medbay table right now, struggling to breathe as an alien parasite chokes the life out of her. Therefore, it’s Alex’s fault.
Where Kara goes, Alex goes. Even when that place is an imaginary version of Krypton.
She wakes under a red sun, and for a moment she’s confused. Red suns, in her experience, mean Lex Luthor and worldwide crisis, not a blissful utopia. But when she sees a car fly past the window, she suddenly understands. She’s on Krypton.
It’s not hard to find Kara. She had thought that would be the hard part, or maybe that reasoning with her, getting her to leave her dream world, would be the hard part. She wasn’t prepared for the look of confusion in Kara’s eyes. Wasn’t prepared for Kara to pull a young Clark behind her, like her needed protecting from Alex.
Wasn’t prepared for Kara to say “I have no sister.”
She doesn’t see Kara, confused by the Black Mercy, hit her over the head with a metal figurine, though somehow she feels it, even if it’s all in her head.
When she wakes, she’s handcuffed, and her heart is sinking. It’s sunk lower over the past few months than it ever had before, but she keeps finding new lows to reach. Kara’s stands behind someone who looks so much like Astra that Alex wants to vomit, even though she knows intellectually that it must be Kara’s mother.
She has nothing left to lose if she loses Kara, that’s how she ended up here in the first place. So she strains against the people holding her and she screams at Kara. Screams about them and about their friends and about everything they have left to do together. And if it stings that Kara doesn’t remember Alex but instead somehow remembers Supergirl (which is a name Cat Grant came up with and Kara didn’t even like at first), that sting is washed away in the tides of relief. The world is falling apart around them, and if she can just reach her sister’s hand, she knows it’ll be okay. Everything will be okay.
But she can’t reach, can’t grab her baby sister and pull her back into the real world.
Instead, the next thing she knows J’onn is standing over her. The concern in his eyes means nothing against the wave of panic that rises in her throat.
She was so close, so close, and if she was about to die to get there, then so be it. She’s okay with that, always has been. She made that decision the day she joined the DEO - whatever it took to keep Kara safe. And if that hurt J’onn’s feelings, she couldn’t afford to care.
She’s screaming, words that hurt her own ears, but the next moment they’re wiped away.
Because Kara wakes up.
—
Twenty eight is too young to bury your favorite person, so once again, Alex follows Kara to the brink of death. Fights the waves that are trying to pop her brain like a balloon and plucks her sister’s limb body out of the stars. And Alex has never believed in higher powers, but she can imagine one, now. Because Kara’s heart is still beating, somehow, when Alex gets there, and Alex makes it back to earth before any permanent damage is done to their brains. Alex follows Kara to the brink of death and brings them both back safely. Kara opens her eyes and the knot in Alex’s chest loosens just a bit. Even if she knows now it’ll never go away.
She carries the knot with her, from home to work to sister night, and tells everyone everything’s fine. That she likes working with her sister, is proud of her for becoming Supergirl.
It’s not a lie, exactly. She does understand now that Kara feels like she has to do this, probably in the same way that Alex feels like she has to protect Kara. She does like the time they get to spend together. She is proud of the good Kara brings into the world. She just doesn’t like the close calls, the fights, the effort that it takes to push the worst case scenario out of her head. She doesn’t like the textbook they’re amassing on how Kryptonians react to various injuries and ailments.
She doesn’t like that she now knows what it sounds like to hear Kara say goodbye.
—
Alex is twenty nine the second time Kara slips into a coma. Not the second time Kara almost dies, mind you; they’ve lost count of the kidnappings and the blackmails and the fatal blows just barely dodged.
Kara is standing in the DEO lobby one second, and the next she drops. With nothing more than a glance from some unknown (and now missing) prisoner, Kara is completely unconscious and unresponsive to outside stimuli, head lolling in Mon-El’s arms. Alex still doesn’t like Mon-El, but she begrudgingly admits she’s thankful he was paying better attention that she was, noticed something was wrong while Alex’s eyes were still on the portal that had just opened.
Six hours later and Kara’s officially in a coma for no discernible reason, but her vitals are dropping and she keeps seizing and nothing Alex can think of will even pause the downward trend.
This time it’s something to do with inter-dimensional travel and horrible imps and there’s nothing to fight. Nothing to dodge or kick or even unleash a fancy new medicine on. Just when Alex thinks it can’t get any worse, they decide to take her to Earth-1, where the prisoner went, and J’onn decides Alex should stay behind.
This isn’t something science can fix, he tells her, and Earth-1 has no shortage of people more capable than her for kicking. Instead, Mon-El comes along, scoops Kara off the med bay bed, and carries her out of the universe.
For three days DEO agents do everything in their power to stay out of her sight. All except for Winn, who fills the little brother role well. He forces Alex to eat and drink and go home at closing time, and keeps the alcohol out of her hands until noon, and then decisions out of her hands until she sobers up. He does it with such finesse that Alex wonders if Kara trained him for this, if after so many close calls she thought she should find a few replacements.
The thought makes the knot in her chest clinch so tight that she can’t breathe and as much as she searches, she can’t find the key to loosening it at the bottom of any bottles. Maggie picks her up and takes her out the back door, and then holds her tight as she cries out all the tears she held in all day.
When Kara steps back through the portal, looking good as new and more in love than ever, Alex holds herself at attention to keep from crying.
Mon-El comes through right behind her. Alex doesn’t speak to him for a week after he gets back.
The next week Alex almost dies, again, and even feeling water trickle into her lungs is preferable to the agony she’d felt the week before.
The day has a happy ending, by the skin of their teeth. Recovering in the med bay, Alex can tell, in the stiffness of Kara’s posture and the way she avoids eye contact, that Kara blames herself. Alex doesn’t try to argue it. Deep down, Alex knows it’s her own fault; Rick wouldn’t have known Kara had powers if she’d protected Kara better, kept her from revealing herself on the beach and then again as Supergirl. Alex knows she earned every heartache she’s been through. But Kara won’t hear any different, so the best Alex can do is insist that she forgives Kara for something Kara didn’t do wrong in the first place.
—
Kara turns twenty-six. Alex turns thirty and distantly wonders how many more ‘big’ birthdays she has left. She’s cheated death so many times in thirty years, is it hubris to think she’d make it to forty? Can she even imagine a world where she lives to fifty?
She doesn’t have much time to wonder about these things, though, because the next day a new Kryptonian appears on the scene; decades after Krypton exploded and three years after they thought they’d seen the last one leave, a refugee again after siding with Non and implementing Myriad.
This one’s different; she wears a mask and calls herself Reign, like she’s above even other Kryptonians. This one knows the Earth, knows their culture, like a predator who’s learned the patterns of its food.
She’s stronger too, strong enough that the footage they can find of her rattles Alex to her core. But decision after decision after decision has led them to this inevitability. Kara will fight Reign, after a strongly worded speech about forgiveness or hope or some other positive adjective, and Alex, helpless, will have nothing to do but watch and pray that Reign, while strong, isn’t stronger than Kara.
Be cold. Be Kryptonian, Alex tells Kara as she storms off to take her anger at Mon-El out on Reign, and it’s only as she’s watching her baby sister fall forty stories that Alex realizes the mistake she’s made. She’s watching the baby sister that is supposed to be able to fly, now falling, falling, falling, until she craters into the sidewalk in downtown National City.
By the time Alex is able to make her legs move, to scramble over the planter beds and down into the pile of rubble kicked up around that red cape and boots, Kara’s unconscious. Maybe she was knocked unconscious the instant she hit the ground, or maybe she was already unconscious as Reign held her over the city. It would explain why she didn’t fly aw—
“Is she dead?” a kid in the crowd calls out. Alex feels the last straw by which she’s clinging to her sanity begin to crack.
Kara’s back in a coma, and again Alex has no one to blame but herself. Because there would always be a Reign, but Alex needed to make sure Kara was better than that.
By the time they wheel her into the medbay, in a scene that feels far too familiar for Alex’s comfort, Kara’s crashing and Alex is desperately wracking her brain for anything that could help, none of them built for dealing with this level of trauma.
She’s still not happy with Mon-El for an impossibly long list of reasons, but he earns a substantial amount of brownie points for saving Kara’s life with thirty-first century technology.
—
Kara is twenty-seven when someone seeds the air with Kryptonite.
It’s a normal day at Catco. That, in itself, should’ve been suspicious. CatCo didn’t get very many normal days and the superfriends, well, the superfriends had long-since shifted their definition of ‘normal’, because they hadn’t had what most of the world considered a normal day in at least four years. Possibly ever. But normal mornings, normal spans of a few hours, did happen on occasion. The DEO could handle most problems, as could the NCPD, as Maggie had always reminded them. Supergirl didn’t need to get snakes out of trees anymore.
CatCo, however, could use their budding star reporter. Kara had learned a thing or two from Cat Grant, and even more from being put through the ringer with Snapper. Sure, she’d never gone to journalism school, but she had a knack for it, and it was nice to be exploring that, on the rare mornings when the world wasn’t ending.
“There’s a new roller rink opening downtown I’d like to cover.” One of the other reporters said.
“That’s cool, but what’s the story?” James asked.
“I think this is a sign of a larger shift. Not just a place for birthday parties, but an opportunity for a community to grow. I want to speak to that shift, and the importance of places like roller rinks in our city.”
“I have a friend who’s a roller skater, who was a part of the movement to get the rink here, I can—“ Kara stops midsentence.
They wait, a beat, then two, for her to gather her thoughts or bow out, but it’s silence.
“Hey, are you okay?” James asks, finally, and Kara doesn’t respond but there’s confusion in her eyes andthey flick to him, suddenly panicked, for only an instant.
Kara falls to the floor, gasping for air, and the meeting is forgotten.
“Kara?” James is by her side as soon as he can get around the table, but she’s unresponsive. Her breathing labored, and he would think it’s a heart attack or a brain aneurysm if it weren’t the only invincible person on the planet.
A vein in her cheek glows green, and it clicks for James. He doesn’t know why, or where it’s coming from, but it’s Kryptonite. He scans the room, frantically, trying to think of who could have it. Someone with it concealed on their person? A lead lined case? But he’s worked with most of these people for years, and can’t imagine any of them knowing Kara’s identity, no matter how terrible a liar she is.
“Everyone out!” James yells, and most people listen. Most people are happy to go about their day pretending they’re invincible, letting other people deal with mortality. Nia trails behind, better than most people. She wants to help, likes Kara, even if she’s only known her for a few weeks.
“Should I call 911—”
“No, Kara…” James wracks his brain for an excuse, “she has a special medical condition. Her sister is a doctor and can treat it.”
If Nia recognizes the green veins, she says nothing. And he’s only known her for a few weeks, but he trusts Nia. Not enough to tell her the truth, but enough to enlist her help.
“We need to get her to the balcony.”
“It’s Supergirl!” Nia calls out, and James is confused. The conference room is glass, as is the wall of the building outside, and through it, James can see someone barrel through the window, sending glass everywhere - the insurance on that single window is obscene these days, and they’re still getting their money’s worth - in blond hair and a red cape.
It takes a second, as James’s brain catches up to what he’s seeing: it must be J’onn, which means Alex must know what’s going on.
J’onn doesn’t even pause as he speeds back out the broken window. There’s a small crater in the floor where her head had hit, still more super than human even as the kryptonite worked its painful magic.
—
Alex is thirty-one and she has never been so angry in her life. This wasn’t a fight, where Kara punched a villain and they punched her until someone lost. This was a coward’s move; an attack not only on Supergirl but also on Kara Danvers. Kara Danvers who hosts game nights for her friends and is single-handedly keeping the Chinese restaurant around the corner in business with her pot-sticker consumption. Kara Danvers who wears cardigans and ponytails and tries just as hard to get a quote for an article as she does to save people’s lives as Supergirl.
Kara Danvers who is seizing on a med-bay table as she struggles to breath around the kryptonite burning her lungs.
Alex has also never felt so guilty. In addition to all the usual reasons it’s her fault, the lead dispersal device was under her protection. It was her agent who decided to betray them all instead of following her. She knew the lead dispersal device could have been reverted back to Kryptonite dispersal, and yet she kept it safe here, under her not-watchful-enough eye, instead of destroying it. And then her Kryptonite shield isn’t enough, nothing is enough against a world suddenly poisonous to Kara. When Brainy says there’s nothing left to do, the crack in her heart that chips a little deeper every time they’re in this situation almost splits her in two.
Alex doesn’t like Lena the way her sister does, (to be fair, no one likes Lena the way her sister does), but she respects her, and at this point she would call Lex Luthor himself if she thought he would have any help for them.
Lena, inexplicably, has a suit for Supergirl that is not only airtight but also filters out kryptonite. Alex has more than a few questions about exactly why Lena made Supergirl a power ranger suit, but she’s too thankful to ask any of them.
—
Alex is thirty-three and she has it all. And yet, sitting around the breakfast table with her wife and her daughter — because she has that: a wife and a daughter now— she can’t help the fear that creeps in through her walls, no matter how much she tries to fortify them. Her sister came out as Supergirl and Alex can’t say anything. Can’t say boo about it because what’s done is done, and because it was always Kara’s secret to tell. Even if Kara believes people are good to a fault. Even if Kara’s in a coma every year as Supergirl, and she just handed every villain, super or not, a carte blanche to come after her as Kara too. Even then, Alex has to keep her mouth shut and focus on all the things she does have.
But Alex is thirty-three and she knows, from years and years of experience, that the more you have, the more you have to lose.