639. Chapter 639
They’ve been texting throughout the day.
They’ve been texting, and Alex has been insisting that she should stay with Lena, take care of Lena. That she’s fine.
Well, that she’ll be fine eventually.
Even after she and Maggie’d had sex, even after Maggie had left and Alex had broken.
She’d insisted to her sister that she was fine.
But she wasn’t.
She wasn’t fine.
She was exactly what Kara said she’d be.
Broken and drinking in a bar.
Destroyed.
Useless.
Well, Kara hadn’t gone that far, necessarily, but it translated the same way in Alex’s head.
She should be stronger than this. Stronger than… herself.
And she reminds Kara, the moment she gets to the bar.
She reminds Kara, and Kara’s apology is immediate, right after her call to J’onn.
“Alex, you know I… I should never have said that to you. Compared my… thing to your relationship. I shouldn’t have – “
“You didn’t do this, Kara,” Alex interrupts her, angling another empty shot glass toward her sister for emphasis. “I’m the one who ruined everything, not you.”
“You didn’t ruin anything, Alex, you just – “
“I just told the woman I love that she wasn’t enough, just like everyone else in her damn life ever has.”
Kara blinks and she shakes her head because Alex’s shoulders have started to shake, her calm, steely composure starting to crack.
But then Alex blinks and shakes her head and orders another line of shots, and her calm, cold, drunken composure is back.
“You loved her well, Alex. You loved her so well. You’re not her parents. You didn’t abandon her. You have needs and she has different needs, and it’s terrible, but it’s… it’s what she said a few days ago, right? Better now than five years down the road when your lives are even more entangled?”
Alex shudders and drinks and Kara bites her lip and signals for water.
“And two club sodas, please,” a gruff voice joins them, and Alex doesn’t look up at her space father. She can’t.
And he doesn’t ask her to. He just covers his hand with his own and sits. Sits and loves her, and tries to radiate it to a non-telepathic being as much as he can.
“Club sodas?” yet another voice enters the mix. “Not for us. Can we get two glasses of merlot, please?”
Alex blinks. “Lena, Sam, what – “
“Ruby’s with a sitter, and – “
“But Lena, you – “
“Have been proven innocent and am getting those children the best care they can possibly get. And now, Alex Danvers, you need…” She hesitates before she uses the word, but Kara’s pinky brushes hers, and it gives her courage. “Friends. You need friends. And you have them.”
Alex shudders, and J’onn knows. “Your brothers are with Maggie, Alex. They’re taking good care of her, and they send all their love to you. They just wanted her to know that she’s not – “
“Abandoned,” Alex’s voice breaks, and finally, so does her body.
She looks up at J’onn like she’s just realizing he’s there. “J’onn, you could… could you? J’onn.” Her voice breaks, because suddenly she’s drowning in the feeling of waking up tomorrow without her.
Of making coffee for one and rolling over in bed to find cool sheets instead of warm ones, of longing for a woman she turned away, of working cases without her fiancee.
Of telling her mother, her family’s friends, her colleagues.
The sympathetic looks at the DEO and memories of Maggie’s laughter and her hands on her waist and her kisses to the back of her neck and the aching, aching need for lips that she’ll never kiss again…
“J’onn, please. I don’t want… I can’t do this. I can’t feel this, I can’t… J’onn, you could wipe my mind. You’ve gotten so good at it, on humans, you could – “
“Alex – “
“No, please. You could make sure I don’t remember the parts that I – “
“Alex, I can’t – “
“But you can! You can, but you won’t! You won’t, because – “
“Alex, stop it – “
“No, Kara, you were allowed! You were allowed to be horrible to people after everything that happened. What about me? Where do I get to let it out? Where do I get to suffer? Where do I get to – “
She’s standing, now, and she’s half-yelling, now, and Kara’s holding Lena’s hand and Lena’s reaching for Sam’s, because J’onn is just wrapping his arms around her.
He’s wrapping his arms around his eldest earth daughter and holding tight.
Holding tight even when she pushes, even when she hits.
“I don’t want to remember! I don’t want to remember the way she says my name and I don’t wanna remember the gross way she eats bagels or the gross way she takes her coffee or the way she kisses me, because she’s just gonna be kissing someone else, someone else is going to be touching that birthmark on the small of her back and someone else is going to be smelling her shampoo all over their pillow and I can’t, J’onn, I can’t do it, I can’t, I can’t, please, please, don’t – “
“Alex, listen to me. Alex. Alex, please.” And it’s something in the pleading in his voice, something in the tears streaming down Kara’s face, that makes her pause, that makes her bite her lip hard enough to make herself stop ranting, to make herself breathe.
“Alex, those memories are sacred. The moments you and Maggie had together are sacred, and they always will be. You’ll always have grown from them. They will always have changed you. If I took them away from you, you wouldn’t be the same, Alex. And I love the person that you are, the person that you’ve become. Erasing that would help in the short term, but it would be erasing such a big part of yourself. And that… I would never do that to a child of mine.”
Lena’s head is on Kara’s shoulder, now, and Sam’s is on Lena’s. They all nod softly at Alex, and she shudders one more time before letting herself collapse forward into J’onn’s arms.
“I got you,” Kara moves forward to remind her sister, kissing her hair as she cries into J’onn’s chest, and Alex nods helplessly, because she can barely breathe and she certainly can’t stand up on her own, but it turns out she doesn’t have to.
Because her family’s got her.