33. Chapter 33

She was drunk the first time she shot up.

Drunk and desperate to feel something aside from the dull emptiness that being kissed by him had left her with, something aside from Eliza’s voice in her ear, asking how she could possibly be at a party when there were tests to take, experiments to run, a sister to be taking care of, a perpetually unsatisfied mother to please, a dead father to somehow replace and make proud at the same time.

She’d rambled at top speed about the chemical composition of meth, about the exact effect it was having on her central nervous system, about exactly how it was crashing into the other chemicals in her body to make her heart race like this, to make her talk this quickly, to make her fuck him this hard, to make her able to run complex chemical equations in her head while he hiked up her skirt and she clawed her nails into his back.

She was stone cold sober – well, only with a glass or two of wine in her, which was sober these days – the next time she shot up.

Because god, she’d gotten her work done quickly that first night, even though she was wasted off her mind, even though the formulas she ran through came to her while she was throwing up.

Eliza wanted her to get her MD and her PhD in less time than it took most people to get their BA? Fine. She could work with that.

With a little help.

But a little help became a lot, and by the time she found herself locked in a cell with some government agent who claimed to know her father – god, what would her father think – her skin was starting to crawl and her body was starting to quake, because what had been a what the hell I’m a failure anyway decision had become a how the hell else am I going to make it through this week without it necessity.

He was the first man since her father – this Hank Henshaw guy – who held her gently, who held her kindly, who held her without wanting to get into her pants, without wanting anything but what was best for her.

He held her while she shook and he held her while she yelled until her throat bled and he closed his strong hands over her protesting wrists when she wanted to hit, when she wanted to claw, when she wanted to slip out of her own skin because Jesus fuck hadn’t she already failed enough, suffered enough?

He watched her when she started to stand on her own and he watched her when she learned how to fight. He watched her when she withdrew to a place inside her mind that looked as dark as some of the corners of his own mind; shadows and demons and terrors that he’d rarely seen behind another human’s eyes.

He watched her as she squinted, as she breathed, as she clenched her knuckles around the edge of lab tables while she analyzed alien cells, as she slammed her fists into opponents in whose faces she imagined her own.

He watched her as she became her own fuel, as she replaced what she could get from a needle, from the edge of a knife, with her own grit, her own growing love for herself, and he watched her as she called her little sister just to say hello, just to say that yes, the lab work was going well, because, finally… it was.

He watched the grin spread across her face when she beat him for the first time, when she completed her training and she became a DEO agent, she became her sister’s protector – again – she became her own person – again.

He watched from a distance as she commanded her first mission into the field, as she gained the respect of the agents she herself started to train. As she drew her arm around the shoulder of another lost soul he’d picked up, as she held the younger woman through her own shakes, through her own screams, and helped her become her own agent, her own superhero.

And he smiled, because – despite who her sister was – Alex Danvers had become his.

And – from the determined grin on her face when she told him that her sister broke the sound barrier, from the relief in her eyes when she brought Kara back from the heaven of the Black Mercy, from the happiness in her stance when she told him she was gay, when she told him she was in love, when her ears grew red when Maggie kissed her hello and told J’onn that she was the lucky one – he smiled because Alex had finally become her own superhero, too.