84. Chapter 84

It’s a small dinner, because Alex hadn’t said anything, but she’d seen Alex fidgeting with her hands, pulling the strands at the hem of her Stanford sweater on the plane. She’d felt the deep breaths Alex was taking, seen her biting the inside of her cheek.

So instead of her mother inviting the entire family, Maggie talked them into having dinner, just her and her dad and her mom and her… and Alex, because she’d noticed that Alex was calmer around smaller groups of people. It wasn’t obvious to other people – she was amazing, she was always amazing – but the more eyes on her, the more she did the little things. Like picking at the hem of her sweater, before and after (never during. She was too composed for during).

So Maggie had wrangled her mother down into a small dinner, for tonight at least, until Alex got acclimatized to Blue Springs, Nebraska.

And when her skeptical father puts a familiar lump in Maggie’s throat and asks, while Alex is helping her mother in the kitchen, “And how exactly is this woman better for you than that Tomás fellow who’s been asking after you since you were fifteen?”, Maggie swallows rage and irritation and a lecture about what it means to be a lesbian, damnit.

Because instead, she just starts talking about Alex.

“Pop, Alex is…” She stares at her father’s guarded face – one she knows she inherited – and she sighs and she starts again. “She saved my life. I mean, she’s saved my life so many times, but she… you know, it’s one thing to put yourself in the line of fire – literal fire – “ She chuckles to herself at her own inside joke. “– for your partner in the force, you know? You spend all day with them, you know their family, you… but Alex? It didn’t matter that she barely knew me, it didn’t matter that I wasn’t on her team, that I… She’s brave and she’s tough and she’s gentle, Pop, she – she’s all these contradictions, like, she’s completely devoted to her job but she’ll throw everything away to protect the people she loves, she… she’s a family woman, Pop, you should see the way she dotes on her little sister, she gives up everything for her, even when it hurts her, even when it could literally kill her, and she just…”

Maggie pauses because she’s a detective, and she detects, sees her father’s gaze flitting over her shoulder, and she turns, following his eyes to where Alex is standing in the kitchen doorway with a stack of plates and watery eyes and slightly parted lips.

They just stare at each other for a long moment, and Maggie swallows the lump in her throat, the fear, the exhilaration, in her belly.

“You’re my hero, Alex,” she tells her, voice full of gravel and voice full of hope.

She turns back to her father and she repeats her words, knowing Alex, knowing that Alex will need to hear them again, because her sister is Supergirl for crying out loud and people don’t tell her enough that she is her own damn superhero.

“She’s my hero, Pop, and I’m in love with her. So uh. Yeah, she’s better for me than some man. Better for me than anyone.”

Her father nods slowly and her father continues looking beyond his daughter to the woman he’s beginning to realize will be his daughter-in-law one day. He sighs without sound and he raises his eyebrows like he’s trying to sort something out in his mind, and he reaches forward and he kisses his daughter’s forehead.

“I hope you’re her hero too, Mags. Because you’re certainly mine.”

“Oh, don’t worry, Mr. Sawyer. She is. She is.”