224. Chapter 224

She remembers everything she said.

Everything.

She remembers every one of Kara’s reactions, every nuance of her fear, every detail of her pain.

And it wasn’t her hand, but she still remembers slamming it into Kara’s skin.

She’s punched her sister before.

In DEO training. That time when she was 17 and they both got a little carried away with Mario Kart (it was an accident).

She’s punched her sister before, and she’s knocked her down. She’s taken the wind out of Supergirl, and she’s made Kara cry.

She’s strong. Very.

But she’s not as strong as the white Martian whose flesh wasn’t hers but was, whose memories weren’t hers but were.

And in these memories, she feels how fragile Kara is, how breakable Supergirl is.

All because of the snarl that’s not her snarl, the unearthly strength that’s not her strength.

The agony of knowing what she was doing – and because she wasn’t doing it, she was laying inert, weak, destroyed, shattered – the agony of not being able to stop it.

And it replays every night.

Every night, she watches the insecurity flicker behind Kara’s eyes when the white Martian had called her whiney, had told her it was exhausting to pretend to care about her feelings.

Because it wasn’t Alex – it wasn’t even Alex’s body – but she remembers it like it was, and she knows Kara saw her, heard her, touched her, like she was.

She’d done it to her again.

Tried to kill her, forced her to fight back.

Under Myriad, and now this. This wasn’t the same. And she’d snapped out of Myriad.

She knows this. She knows it.

But knowing it doesn’t stop the nightmares.

She wakes up sweating and she wakes up screaming, and Maggie holds her with one arm, soothes her with soft lips and even softer words, and she angles her body, both of their bodies, so she can reach her phone, so she can type out a one-handed text to Kara.

And Kara is always there, within minutes.

The first couple of times, neither of them are wearing shirts, and the gravity of Alex’s nightmares is temporarily replaced with the awkward hilarity of the situation.

But Alex starts sleeping in a shirt, because she surrenders to the knowledge that these nightmares aren’t going anywhere any time soon, and Maggie follows suit.

Every time, Maggie will transfer Alex from her own strong arms into Kara’s, and Kara will kiss her forehead and her hair and soothe her heavy, gasping, apologetic breathing, coo that she has nothing to apologize for, that it wasn’t her, it wasn’t her, it wasn’t her.

Every time, Maggie will stop in the doorway and watch the Danvers girls for a long, sad moment; sad because Alex is in pain, because the strain of it is eating away at her, at Kara; but grateful, too, because they have each other through it. They’re closer through it.

Every time, Maggie pads into the kitchen to make them all hot chocolate, and she lingers until Alex’s sniffles slow and, eventually, subside.

Every time, they sip in silence, and every time, once their drinks are finished, Alex settles deep into the blankets between her sister and her lover, and Maggie mouths thank you to Kara over Alex’s exhausted head, and Kara mouths exactly the same.

After nearly a week of this, Maggie asks Kara to just spend the entire night sleeping over, and Kara smiles, and her heart breaks in the best of ways, because she’d wanted to from night one but had been scared to impose on Alex’s private time with her girlfriend.

So it becomes a routine: Maggie cooks four times the amount of dinner she normally does, because Kara is Kara, and she and Kara stay awake long after Alex drifts off in their arms, to make sure, to make sure, to make sure.

And eventually, the nightmares stop, but the habit doesn’t, because still, long after Alex has forgiven herself for something she never did, there are nights that Kara just sleeps over with her sister and her sister’s girlfriend, because if they’re being honest, they all sleep better the closer they are to each other.