Chapter 10
Alex might have insisted that Maggie’s NCPD lab was like an easy bake oven compared to the DEO’s tech – and, okay, after seeing that James Bond style facility, maybe that was a little true – but Maggie grinned with her tongue between her teeth as she retested all the microscope slides she’d just finished making, just finished a total of seven hours gathering, computerizing, microprinting, setting, testing, redoing, testing again.
Her hair was pulled back out of her face and her fingers were drenched in the dye she was using to give the slides the best contrast on such an old microscope, and when Kara stepped silently into the doorway of her lab and watched her bending painstakingly over Alex’s gift, she understood what her sister had meant when she’d called her beautiful. So beautiful.
“Hey Maggie,” Kara said softly, not wanting to startle her. She did anyway, but Maggie recovered quickly.
“Little Danvers,” she greeted, straightening up and trying to stretch a crick out of her neck. “How’d you get clearance to be in here?”
Kara grinned and stepped into Maggie’s space, checking that no one was around. “There was a window open in the lab next door.”
Maggie chuckled and rolled her eyes. “You’re lucky I don’t arrest you for breaking and entering. Into a police precinct.”
Kara shrugged innocently. “I didn’t break a thing. Are those the slides? Is it done?”
“Mmhmm!” Maggie beamed as she stepped back and gestured Kara grandly toward the microscope, toward the set of a couple dozen slides that she’d painstakingly prepared.
Kara’s eyes flooded as Maggie took her on a tour through the literal microscopic slideshow she’d prepared for Alex. Her eyes flooded as Maggie told her why she included each tiny photo, as she gave comical explanations for the close-up of the pool table at the bar and beautiful explanations for the photo of an old grass-covered field that she used to run sprints on, alone each morning as the sun came up, in Blue Springs. Her eyes flooded as Maggie got shy about the last photo – a selfie she’d snapped of her and Alex kissing in Maggie’s bed, Alex’s glasses on and Maggie’s hair swept up away from her face, both of them in sweaters and jogging shorts, surrounded by police reports and DEO files and a half-eaten pie of pizza.
“I’ve… never seen her like this,” Kara told her once she straightened up and found her voice. Maggie tilted her head.
“I...” Kara cleared her throat and started again. “She’s never brought work home from the DEO. Or the library at school, or the lab. She just… she just stayed at work, at school, slept there, ate there, basically lived there. I’ve never seen her…” Kara peered back down into the microscope and adjusted the fine focus so she could she even better how relaxed Alex’s body was, how melted she was against Maggie’s lips. “Heck, I’ve never even seen her let anyone else know she wears glasses, let alone wear them in front of someone.”
She looked back up at Maggie, whose own eyes, now, were flooded. “I just want to make her happy, Kara.”
Kara smiled. “You do. You will. This… she’s gonna love this so much.”
“Yeah? It’s not stupid?”
“It’s perfect,” Kara assured her. Maggie’s phone chirped, then, and she cleared her throat as she checked it.
“Duty calls,” she said, and gestured to the lab’s window with a wink. “I’m sure you can show yourself out.”
Kara laughed softly to herself and wondered as she leapt out of the window and into the brisk air if this was going to be the first Christmas – the first holiday – where Alex didn’t feel the need to get drunk to cope.
James didn’t have to look up to know that the person knocking on Cat’s office doorframe was Alex.
Kara would just walk in, as would Winn. And everyone else at CatCo, their knocks would either be immensely timid or immensely irritable, needing something more urgently than he could give it.
Alex’s knock? Alex’s knock, just three quick raps, was at once efficient and tentative; at once vulnerable and confident. Everything about Alex was in the way he knocked on her door, and he smiled as he looked up to see her strolling in.
“Are they ready?”
He just grinned wordlessly and took her by the arm, guiding her to his old art department office, where he still maintained a workspace for the sake of his own sanity.
“You don’t think the whole idea is stupid, do you? I mean, they’re mostly pictures of me, right, how arrogant is that, like ‘here Maggie, you can stare at me all the time, that’s your present?’”
He cut Alex’s rambling off before it descended into a Kara-style affair. “Alex. Maggie is going to love this. Trust me. Just… just look.”
She stepped into his office at his urging and had to hold in a gasp – badass DEO agents do not gasp – when she saw the photo frames she’d picked out, now holding the photos James had taken the other day.
“James,” she whispered, not knowing which photo to pick up first, which to look at.
She’d never seen herself like this. Never through the eyes of someone else. Never through the eyes of someone who cared about her, who respected her, who loved her. James had immortalized her, not as she felt, but as a perfect combination of how he saw her, and how he wanted to show her to Maggie, in those moments he’d snapped of her searching for gifts, of her contentedly sipping hot cider on a cold day, of her tossing her head back laughing when they saw a ridiculous painting that reminded them of Winn.
But there weren’t just photos of her alone. He’d also snapped away when they ran into Kara and Maggie; when she let the bags she was carrying hang off her forearms so she could reach up and caress Maggie’s hair, Maggie’s cheeks; when she pulled her face toward her, letting her lips part to kiss her, letting her eyes flutter closed; when their bodies had melded together, Christmas lights from the displays around them playing on their skin, on their hair, on their coats that were keeping them less warm than the contact between their bodies.
His photographs made it so desperately clear how different she was, now. Now that she knew, now that she accepted, now that she loved, and let herself love. His photographs made it so desperately clear how intently she loved the woman in her arms, the woman in her thoughts, the woman behind her smile.
“James,” she whispered again.
“I told you she’d love it.”
Alex chuckled. “I’m kinda worried now she’ll fall for the photographer instead of the subject!”
James tossed his head back laughing, and Alex wondered how she got so lucky to have him in her life. “I don’t really think I’m her type, Alex. I also don’t think she has eyes for anyone but you.”
Alex pffted and shuffled her feet in a way James was certain he’d never seen her do before coming out, before Maggie.
He wondered vaguely after she hugged him for a good long time, as he watched her leave carefully cradling the stack of photo frames in her arms, how different, how much more self-assured, she’d be by next Christmas. He grinned at the thought.
Gift exchange tonight, right? Alex sent the text nervously once she got back to the DEO, dodging a raised eyebrow from J’onn about the way she kept staring at her phone like it was about to come alive.
She didn’t have to wait long.
Wouldn’t miss it.
What she didn’t know was that Maggie had been thinking about missing it, had been thinking about calling it off, had been thinking about wrangling together another time to give Alex her present.
Because – bonding time with Kara aside – Maggie still wasn’t too sure about this whole ‘all the Superfriends are getting together to give each other presents and you barely know anyone you’re just sleeping with the sister but you’ll be there anyway and whoops’ thing. She’d bought them all gifts while she’d been out with Kara, but she was reasonably sure none of the Superfriends would have gotten her anything – why would they? – and she felt stupid, she felt exposed, she felt like she’d be embarrassed, like she’d embarrass everyone else, by getting them something when they would have nothing for her.
It had never exactly gone well, her past relationships mixing with ex girlfriends’ friendships. She liked these people, these friends, this family, that Alex had. She liked them, a lot, but history was strong, and her track record was strong, and she was more than a little nervous about this whole concept of coming to such a tightly-knit family’s holiday gift exchange party.
But Maggie was beginning to learn to read the tones behind Alex’s texts, and the last one she sent, the very unnecessary confirmation of tonight’s plans between two extremely efficient, plan-oriented women? That text, simple as it might have seemed to someone else, screamed to Maggie of Alex’s wide-eyes, of her near constant need for confirmation that Maggie did, in fact, like her, of her bubbling desire to have her there, to hold her hand in front of her friends, to have her join her group of friends; her family.
Maggie understood all that, liked all that – loved all that, if truth be told, but if Alex was barely ready to comprehend that Maggie could like her, she knew she should probably hold off on the whole love thing – and so of course. Of course, she’d be there.
Because Alex Danvers was worth the risk. Every risk.
Even if it meant changing clothes four times (she eventually decided on simple black jeans and a black henley, imagining a combination of Alex’s face when she would see her and how bright Kara’s apartment was liable to be).
Even if it meant cruising her Triumph around Kara’s block seven or eight times before her breathing rate settled enough to park and unload the gifts from her saddle bag.
Even if it meant pacing the hallway outside the apartment for long, long minutes – as she had the first time she’d shown up there – as the sounds of Winn’s joyful shouting, James’s ringing laughter, and Kara’s excited proclamations poured along with Christmas music out the door and into her ears.
It was the sound of Alex’s shriek of laughter – at something Winn did, it sounded like – that at once made Maggie want to melt away into the floor and that gave her the courage to raise her hand and knock.
“Maggie!” she heard Kara’s voice and a pattering of footsteps, and her knuckles tightened on the box containing Alex’s microscope; on the overloaded bags containing what she’d found for everyone else.
Alex opened the door with wide eyes and a breathless smile, and Maggie all but forgot how to take in oxygen, let alone form words. They stared at each other for a long moment, a long moment in which the Christmas carols wafting from the inside of the apartment enveloped them, in which James, Winn, and Kara’s “awwww”s and J’onn’s “oh, leave them alone” surrounded them, in which Maggie didn’t have to say she loved her for Alex to know, in which Alex didn’t have to say Maggie was her perfect for Maggie to know.
“Hi,” Alex breathed after that long, long moment.
“Hey.”
“Come in.”
The spell over both women lifted – somewhat – as Alex stepped back to let Maggie into the apartment, where she was greeted by a bouncing-on-her-toes-with-excitement Kara and a holding-out-an-offering-of-beer James. Maggie hugged the first and gratefully clinked bottles with the latter as Winn waved at her from a sea of gift wrapping and J’onn nodded from his spot near the refrigerator.
“Looks like you brought the armada of gifts!” Kara winked, and Maggie’s stomach threatened to rebel until she told herself, over and over and over again, that Kara’s tone was approving, not mocking. That the small, wide-eyed smile on Alex’s face was pleasure, not suppressed irritation. That the smirk on J’onn’s face was a begrudging approval of this new woman holding the heart of his earth daughter, not condescension. That the smile on James’s face was happiness for Alex to have found someone so thoughtful, not sarcasm. That the whoop from Winn and the way he ran over to help her put the bags and microscope box under the tree was genuine enthusiasm, not over-exaggerated responses to make her feel stupid.
“Well, yeah, there’s an armada of you, so…” Maggie found herself explaining to no one in particular as Winn dove into her bags and sorted her gifts – according to the little labels she’d put on the wrapping – into separate piles under the tree, shaking the rectangular box with his name on it and cackling with excitement as he speculated about what it was.
To her surprise – to the clenching of her heart – there was one pile that Winn added nothing to from Maggie’s bag.
A pile of gifts, already wrapped and under the tree, with her name on them, alternately scripted on labels or scrawled directly on the wrapping.
“For me?” she turned to ask Alex, who had crouched next to her and put her hand on the small of her back.
“Of course, for you,” Alex whispered, casually putting her beer into Winn’s hand so she could run her fingers through Maggie’s hair.
“You didn’t think we’d invite you to our gift party and not get you anything, did you, Maggie?” Kara asked, concern written all over her face.
Normally, Maggie would melt into the ground before admitting something so vulnerable, but there was something around Kara’s eyes that looked just like Alex’s, and there was something in the way Winn was shaking his head out of the corner of her eye, and there was something in the way Alex’s thumb was rubbing the small of her back that allowed her to say, “I guess I thought I’d just have something from Alex. Not that you needed to give me anything at all,” she told Alex, who just shook her head and stood up, pulling Maggie with her.
Back home in Blue Springs, there were too many over-sugared, pre-teen cousins to reasonably expect everyone to take turns opening presents, so Christmas morning was always awash with pleasant overstimulation from your aunt’s shriek of excitement that her husband had finally gotten her tickets to that show she wanted to see, the clambering of feet that inevitably erupted when your cousins tore open their new soccer ball and just had to try it right now, the volleys of laughter and playful insults when your mother opened the gag gift that she and her brother had been passing between them for years.
But here? Here, everyone took turns going through their piles, so everyone could watch, could examine, could ooh and ahh and that’s perfect for him and thank you so much, I love it, it’s amazing and where did you get that? and oh crap I was gonna get her that for her birthday, thanks a lot, now I have to think of something new.
The Danvers sisters had insisted that J’onn go first, and Maggie beamed when he laughed – a genuine, wholehearted, pure joy laugh – when he unwrapped the first edition of War of the Worlds she’d found for him. She watched Alex’s shining eyes as he pulled her in for a hug with the homemade thermal gloves she’d bought him, and she doubled over with the rest of them when he uncovered a “Supergirl is the BEST” t-shirt from Kara.
James was next, and Maggie’s heart ached with tenderness when he hugged Alex long and hard for the old camera she’d found him and the overwhelming ache redoubled when he opened the knit cap and scarf Maggie had given him and he whispered in her ear, “I’m happy you’re here,” when he thanked her.
Winn loved the elf-patterned tie Maggie had picked out for him, and he put it on over his sweater right away, pulling her into his side to pose for a selfie. Her hands shook from all the unexpected warmth and attention, even as she laughed along with the rest when Winn shrieked on opening a box full of fake exploding snakes from Alex and James, even as she awwwed along with the rest when J’onn gifted him with a beautiful sterling silver tie clip with the words “IT saves lives” engraved on it.
When everyone chose Kara to go next, Maggie started suspecting that the crew was saving her and Alex for last, and she squirmed with nerves and an unfamiliar but increasing sense of belonging when Kara pulled her in for a long hug after opening the “I write so I can free the world” pen Maggie’d had engraved for her. Alex, eyes wide and glassy, kissed Maggie soundly as Kara opened her next gift. “You’re so thoughtful, babe,” she whispered, and Maggie’s heart thudded.
“Okay, okay, my turn,” Alex said after Kara finished passing around her last gift – a music box playing Kryptonian melodies from James and Winn – and she bounced eagerly on her haunches in a way that made her look more like her little sister than Maggie had ever seen.
She breezed excitedly through her other gifts – taking the time to model her new and improved thigh holster from Winn, which he made her promise she’d never make him regret – and paused with shaking hands when she got to the microscope box, an old, silver and black carrying case, from Maggie.
Maggie chewed on her lower lip and Kara nudged her in the ribs excitedly as Alex’s fingers flipped the case’s lock to reveal the old microscope within.
“Oh, Maggie,” she breathed, lifting it reverently out of its slot and putting it on the space James and Winn hastily cleared for her. “It’s beautiful.” J’onn rushed to plug it in and Alex breathlessly examined it, muttering about its model and make to herself as reverently as though she were meeting the scientist who’d innovated it.
“That’s uh… that’s not all,” Maggie said, and she passed her the box of slides she’d made. Alex furrowed her brow but arranged the first slide under the scope wordlessly.
Everyone held their breath as Alex let out a shuddering breath of her own. “Maggie,” she whispered, saying nothing else as she examined slide after slide, as Maggie narrated each one to her – this one of the lake in Blue Springs where Maggie learned to swim and ice skate; this one of Maggie in her science lab in college; this one of her first day at the police academy; that one the first photo they took together, in the bar the night after they first kissed; that one a Hubble image of Alex’s favorite nebula; that one of sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean; that one of the night sky over Nebraska; that one of Alex and Kara; that one of Alex pulling ridiculous faces and poses with the entire gang, J’onn begrudgingly grinning in the background, arms across his chest; that one of Alex’s fingers intertwined with Maggie’s the last time they strolled on the beach together.
“Maggie,” Alex breathed again, finally looking up from the microscope and blinking tears out of her eyes.
“You made all those slides… for me?”
“Of course for you, babe. I didn’t do all that for Winn.”
“I think I resent being the butt of all the jokes.”
“I think that doesn’t matter.”
Alex pulled Maggie in for a deep kiss. James smiled, Winn whooped, Kara awwwed and lowered her eyes, and J’onn just turned away completely. James thumped him on the back and the sound brought Alex’s lips away from Maggie’s. Her eyes were shining like Maggie had never seen them, and she grabbed for something under the tree.
“Still not done!” She shoved Maggie’s pile of presents at her, and – hands still shaking from the entire evening, from watching Alex with that microscope, with that slideshow; hands still shaking from that kiss – Maggie tore slowly at the wrapping of each gift, still not quite believing that the Superfriends had thought to get her anything at all.
J’onn had gotten her not one, but two things: the first, a more sophisticated bulletproof vest than NCPD could offer, and the second, a short, gag picture book entitled, “So you’re interested in dating my daughter.”
Winn had elaborately wrapped, in a massive box, a tiny, tiny computer chip that he said would allow her phone to cross reference the NCDP’s database with the Fort Rozz escapees list so she could up her chances of knowing, faster, what she might be dealing with in the field.
Kara had gotten her a fresh set of tools to work on her Triumph, which she assured her the woman at the store had explained was top of the line.
James gave her a National City shot glass and a “how-to” pool book, apologetically telling her that his real gift would come with Alex’s.
And then Maggie really stopped breathing, because Alex’s eyes were wide and she was biting her lip and she was clasping her hands together in front of her chest as Maggie uncovered the photo frames Alex and James had put together for her.
It took her longer than it normally might to examine them, to pick each frame up and really look at the photo, because her eyes were suddenly full of tears and her hands were shaking even more than they’d been when she’d first realized that this was not going to be another trainwreck social event that would end with her alone in the street with no one to call and no girlfriend anymore.
“I know they’re mostly of me – James took them when we were shopping for you – and I know they’re not, you know, the most useful present or the fanciest or whatever, but I thought maybe you’d like to hang them on that wall above the couch in your apartment, like maybe we could add to them, see, I got blank frames, too, frames that don’t have pictures yet because they’re for our future pictures that we haven’t taken yet, I mean maybe that’s stupid and presumptuous and I’ve gone too crazy on you and it’s okay if you hate it but I – ”
Alex’s rambling was cut off by Maggie’s hands on her cheeks, in her hair, on the nape of her neck, her lips on her lips, her tongue in her mouth, her tears on her face.
“Alex, no, these are – this is the most perfect gift I’ve ever gotten. It’s perfect, they’re perfect – ” She glanced at James gratefully over Alex’s shoulder and he smiled broadly – “you’re perfect. And this is…” She glanced around at all of them, now, at Alex’s sister and space dad and best friends. “This is perfect.”
“You know what else is perfect?” Kara interjected, heart swollen with happiness but also wanting to give them space to make out not in front of her, “Cookies and potstickers!”
She scrambled up and almost toppled the tree, and a laughing James, Winn, and J’onn followed her, leaving Alex and Maggie wrapped in each other’s arms, wrapped in the midst of torn wrapping and stitched hopes, broken tape and salvaged dreams, wrinkled tissue paper and new beginnings.
“So I take it you like them?” Alex asked of the photos, of the still empty frames, at least one of which was soon to be filled with the picture James was snapping right now. “That’s… that’s what I’m getting.”
Maggie answered with a kiss, and Christmas had never tasted quite that sweet.