Chapter 9
The temperatures had, shockingly, dropped into the 40s and most everyone in National City was red-eared and miserable.
But Maggie? Maggie was ecstatic, with a strong dash of nostalgic.
“Nebraska gets much colder than this,” she told Alex as she burrowed into her chest. She gingerly avoided pressing down on her girlfriend’s stomach, which was full of the chili Maggie had whipped up with the bag of groceries she’d hauled to Alex’s nearly empty kitchen.
The mugs of homemade cocoa Maggie’d made to top off the meal were still steaming, and fogged up Alex’s glasses. Maggie chuckled at the sight and kissed Alex’s nose as she reached up to take them off and wipe them clean on the red and white blanket they were both wrapped in: another addition Maggie had made to Alex’s apartment.
“Some holiday cheer,” she’d argued, and her dimples won before Alex could even think of protesting.
“You know,” Maggie began as she slipped the glasses back onto Alex’s face, sealed with another kiss, “my grandma used to make this cake for us. All leading up to Christmas. First day it’d hit the 30s, she’d made it. Sometimes it randomly got that cold in October, and those years were the best. Didn’t matter if it was before even Halloween; we’d start Christmas whenever we first bit into that cake every year.”
Alex ran her fingers gently through Maggie’s hair, listening. She knew Maggie’s grandmother had died the year before Maggie joined the police force in National City; she knew they’d been close. Very close. She knew her grandma had been the first person Maggie had come out to, had advised her on how to tell her father.
“Make sure you start by telling him how happy you are,” Maggie had translated her words to Alex, “and maybe leave out the parts about how good it feels to kiss the girls, yah?”
Maggie took a long sip of her cocoa and sighed softly into the mug. “She wouldn’t tell any of us the recipe, you know. It was chocolately and fruity and not quite cakey, you know, it kind of melted in your mouth, and I have no earthly idea how she did it or even what was in it. It’d just kind of appear, like Christmas magic or something.” She shrugged.
“Speaking of Christmas magic. You told Kara I’ll give her all the intel she needs for her report on the bar massacre, right?”
Tears nearly flooded Alex’s eyes at the fire in Maggie’s, and she kissed both of her eyelids as she nodded.
“How is that Christmas magic?” she asked with a tight throat.
“She’s doing a memoriam piece. A short profile on everyone. She’ll get people to give a damn. That’s Christmas magic enough, huh?”
Alex drew Maggie in closer as they lapsed into their separate, but so connected, thoughts, their separate, but interwoven, griefs and memories and rages.
She wanted to tell her she loved her. She wanted to tell her she’d always love her, that she would never stop being in awe of the woman laying in her arms.
She watched Maggie’s face bounce between thoughts of the bar and thoughts of her grandmother, and Alex decided she’d show her, instead.
“Winn.”
He grunted in acknowledgement but didn’t take his eyes off of the two delicate wires he was bringing together with pliers and a steady hand.
“I need you to take some information off someone’s phone for me.”
He grunted again before letting out a triumphant laugh at his success. He looked up at her.
“You got it. Who’s phone we talking?”
Alex shifted uncomfortably, her arms crossed over her chest.
“Maggie’s.”
“Alex!”
“Winn! It’s not what you think.”
“I would hope not.”
She thought about smacking him upside the head. She thought about threatening him with her index finger.
But she found that she deeply appreciated his immediate defense of Maggie, his immediate indignation that Alex would snoop through her phone, would violate her privacy, wouldn’t trust her.
He was already loyal to Maggie, and she loved him for it.
But she wasn’t about to tell him that.
“No, it’s just that I… I don’t want to look through her phone myself exactly because I want to respect her privacy. I just need… I need to get in touch with some of her family members. Her mom, aunts, uncles, you know. I – I want to do something for her, for Christmas, and I kind of… I need their help. But I don’t want to go through her phone, so I thought – ”
“You thought I could go through it for you and pull out just the numbers you need and nothing else.”
Alex nodded efficiently as Winn regarded her for a long, long moment. “You know you’re all mushy and romantic now, and it’s kind of ruining your image a bit. You know that, right?”
He braced himself for a smack to the back of the head; he braced himself to be slammed against a wall and threatened within an inch of his life; he braced himself for Alex Danvers to do anything to restore her reputation as a devil-may-care badass, not a lovesick puppy who would do anything to make her girlfriend happy.
He braced himself, but Alex’s actual reaction scared him much more than bodily harm would have.
She smiled. She beamed. She shrugged and tilted her head toward her shoulder and spun on her tip toes to leave the lab, all but skipping to the door. She turned before she left, and, still smiling that I’m-thinking-about-Maggie-Sawyer-and-I’m-the-happiest-woman-alive-smile, said looked him straight in the eyes.
“You tell anyone about this and you’ll find out exactly how I killed that Hellgramite last year.”
She smiled even brighter and waltzed out of the room.
“It, I, uh, I’ll, I’ll get right on it, Agent Danvers,” he said to nothing but his lab equipment, a chill running through his back but a grin creeping onto his lips.
It was all too easy to access Maggie’s contacts remotely with all the DEO tech at his disposal, and he slipped Alex a list of her family’s phone numbers the next morning as she passed his work station on the way to a briefing.
Her smile was only sweet, only loving, only grateful, this time, no hint of teasing, as she palmed the paper and slipped it into her pocket.
“Thank you, Winn.”
“Anytime, Alex.”
And he meant it. That girl was family, and he’d never seen her so happy. He grinned as she nearly skipped into the briefing room, wondering when exactly they got this close and why he was so lucky to have both the Danvers sisters in his life.
Staring at the list of numbers Winn gave her, Alex was having major second thoughts.
She knew Maggie had told her family about her – Alex had practically quizzed her about how everyone reacted – but that didn’t mean she knew what to say.
Hi, I’m sleeping with your daughter/niece/cousin/granddaughter and I want to make her this cake that your mother/mother/grandmother/late wife used to make Maggie and the family because she’s lonely and she’s sad and she misses all of you and she misses her grandma and she doesn’t feel like it’s Christmas without this cake but she has no idea what the recipe was and I’m wondering if you do because I can’t cook worth a damn, let alone bake, but I’m a world-class scientist and I’ll be damned if I can’t figure out how to make this right for her.
It turned out that that script – sans the part about sleeping with Maggie, which she tactfully replaced with “girlfriend,” a label that still gave her butterflies in her stomach and immense leaps in her heart every time she used it to describe her relationship with the amazing woman she couldn’t believe she was lucky enough to be wanted by, liked by – worked very nicely.
It turned out that her family was charmed by Alex’s unsure ramblings, by her pffting when they gave her compliments.
“Mags tells us you’re the most brilliant woman she’s ever known.”
“I’ve never heard her so wild about someone, you must be very special, Agent Danvers.”
“You know I told her I’d beat the crap outta you if you hurt her, and she cracked up because she said there’s no way I could because you’d win, but that if she ever hurt you, she’d let me beat the crap outta her; so I’d say she likes you a lot, you know.”
“How sweet you are to want to do this for her, oh, your soul is just as beautiful as Mags says it is.”
It turned out her family was charmed by the immense contrast between Alex’s awkward negotiation of receiving compliments versus her direct, efficient style of asking questions.
“And do any particular flavors stand out in your memory?”
“Maggie described the texture as not quite cakelike, that it would melt in your mouth; can you elaborate on that? Do you know what ingredients would create that texture?”
“Do you remember her being in the kitchen for a certain period of time when she made this cake, or if the oven was ever left on at a certain temperature?”
In the end, Alex not only had scrapped together what might or might not have been a recipe, the recipe – she wasn’t a world-class secret agent/spy/interrogator/scientist for nothing – but she’d also accumulated a series of Maggie stories that made her heart positively melt.
“She saved my life when we were kids, you know. I was skating on the lake where the ice was too thin, because I was trying to show off for some girl, you know, and Mags dove right in to get me – I couldn’t swim, would you believe that? – and I was at least two times her size, and she still got me out of that freezing water. That cake was the first thing she wanted, even before warm clothes, when she dragged me back to the house.”
“Mags was always different, with the whole liking girls thing and all. The white kids were allowed to be gay, some of them, if they were quiet about it. But from a family with darker skin, and liking girls, and not being quiet about it? And being better at science than all the boys, wanting to go to college? Town small as ours? One of the fathers hit her in the face once, you know, for spending time with his daughter. Maggie swung right back at him, and it took all her cousins and two of her uncles to pull her back after that.”
“You know, Agent Danvers, our Mags gave the eulogy at her funeral, and she made us all laugh, she made us all cry. And the center of her speech was this cake you’re trying to recreate, this cake that always brought the family together. I don’t think you know how much it will mean to Maggie – how much it means to me – that you’re doing this.”
Four hours, seven family members, and five long, shuddering breaths to regain some semblance of her composure, her DEO badass attitude, her I’m-sorry-did-you-say-something-because-I-was-too-busy-cataloging-the-ways-I-can-kill-you strut, Alex Danvers had a shopping list laid out in front of her and an entire evening cleared with J’onn to be off duty.
She nodded at Winn and squeezed his shoulder in gratitude as she headed out. He grinned as he watched her leave, wondering if he should send Kara to Alex’s on standby with a fire extinguisher.
It was a Thursday night and the temperature had dipped into the 30s. Alex hated the cold beyond description, but she relished the timing of the cold front, the almost too-warm quality of her kitchen as she wiped sweat and almond flour off her forehead with the back of her hand, as she headed down to the store for her extra ingredients to fuel her fourth – or was it her seventh? – attempt at this thing.
The first attempt had collapsed in on itself (as had the third).
The second attempt, Maggie had called and the thing had burned while Alex got distracted listening to the sound of that voice, the rhythm of that speech, the rasp in that hint of suggestion when Maggie asked if she could come over later.
Alex lost track after that, of how many times and how many grocery runs to replace destroyed ingredients it became.
She lost track of how messy the kitchen was, of how late the hour was, of how dusted with flour her shirt was.
She only knew that when there was a quick knock at the door, it had finally worked; she only knew that when there was a quick knock at the door, the entire apartment smelled, finally, as Maggie’s older cousin had told her (“Like Christmas, you know? No other way to describe it”); she only knew that when there was a quick knock at the door, the cake, finally, wasn’t collapsed or burnt or too sticky or too cakey; she only knew that when there was a quick knock at the door, her heart was thumping near clean through her chest and an entire new species of butterflies were learning to race in her stomach.
She tugged the door open eagerly and leaned on the side of it, like she’d done the first time Maggie had come over, with a six pack and a large pie.
It had become a weekly tradition, since then.
It had become their thing. One of their many new things.
“Hungry?” Maggie asked, like she always did, exhaustion behind her eyes but pure joy and relief in her body language.
“Yes,” Alex told her, gesturing her inside, wondering for a brief moment why Maggie was tilting her head at her curiously.
“Babe, why are you covered in flour – oh my god, it smells so amazing in here, what have you been – ”
Alex slipped the pizza and beer out of Maggie’s hands and secured them on the counter before Maggie could drop them; before Maggie saw the circular creation freshly steaming on the cooling rack that, unbeknownst to her, her mother had insisted to Alex was a vital part of the texturing process; before comprehension dawned and tears flooded Maggie’s eyes and trembles flooded her hands and shock that someone would do something like this for her splashed down her cheeks and gratitude that this woman, this woman, would care about her like this splashed down the diminishing space between her body and Alex’s; before her lips crashed onto Alex’s, before her tongue was in Alex’s mouth and her own tears were on Alex’s cheeks and her hands were unsure whether to settle in Alex’s hair or on the back of her neck or the small of her back or her hips or her elbows or her arms or under her flour-stained henley, so they roamed everywhere at once.
She tore her own jacket off and backed Alex up until her knees hit the couch, pushing her down, straddling her, and demanding access to her jawline, her throat, her collarbone. Alex moaned as Maggie’s tongue, lips, and teeth found every one of her most sensitive spots, and Alex held her as the fire of Maggie’s kisses yielded to the fire of her pain, of her overwhelmed sense of awe, of gratitude, of disbelief, of how could someone possibly love me this much and how the hell did she make it, anyway and my god, my grandma would have loved her.
Alex held her as hot kisses to the base of her neck became harsh, shuddering breaths, as grinding down on her body became wracked sobs, as breathy thank yous and hows became why would you do this for me?
Alex held her, just held her there on top of her, for a long, long few minutes, until the sobs passed through Maggie, until her eyes mostly dried and she was wiping abashedly at the wet spot she’d left on Alex’s henley.
“I’m sorry,” she muttered, and Alex shook her head and kissed her eyelids and ran her fingers through her hair.
“I just thought you could use a little piece of home for Christmas,” Alex whispered, and Maggie smiled down at her through disbelieving, glassy eyes.
“Alex,” she rasped, gravel and tears still in her voice, “you are my coming home.”
And sure enough, Christmas never had tasted quite as sweet, for either of them.