360. Chapter 360

He’s in mode all day.

He’s in mode and he doesn’t eat and he doesn’t sleep.

Until, that is, James forces him to.

“Dude, I get it, but Alex is in trouble, I’m not gonna just – ”

“Winn. Man. You’re not gonna be any help to Alex if you don’t put something in your body. And just thirty minutes. You can nap for thirty minutes. That’s all. Let your programs run… something, I don’t know. Doesn’t it take them time to run analyses, anyway?”

Winn scowls and he moans, but he chomps down the food James brought him.

He hadn’t realized he was hungry.

“Who’s taking care of you, Olsen?” Vasquez wants to know as James watches Winn eat, his brow furrowed in concern, his eyes red with the weight of sheer refusal to panic.

“I can take care of myself alright,” he offers, and she knows he can, but she also knows that right now, it’s a lie.

“I’ve got a call in for you,” she tells him, and she puts a phone in his hands and walks away without explanation. He stares after her for a moment before putting the phone to his ear.

“Hello?”

“Jimmy. I heard about Alex, I’m getting on the next flight out. Are you alright? Is Kara okay? Oh god, she must be a wreck – ”

“Lucy, what – what are you – ”

“Vasquez called me, James, what do you think I – it doesn’t matter. Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m… I’m good, I just… you’re right, Kara’s a wreck, and Winn hasn’t eaten or slept since she’s been taken, and – ”

“And you haven’t either, I bet.”

James sighs and he can practically hear Lucy’s reprimand.

“Jimmy. Please eat something. I know you can’t sleep when you’re terrified like this – and don’t deny that you’re terrified, James Olsen, don’t you dare do it – but please at least eat something. I don’t know, steal half of whatever you got for Winn or something.”

“We have to stop stealing food from that man.”

“Yeah, we really do. But it got you to laugh.”

There’s a pause, a silence, and it feels comfortable. It feels safe. It feels like maybe Alex will be okay after all.

“You’re on your way?”

“Of course I’m on my way. She’ll be alright, Jimmy. She’s tougher than nails, Alex Danvers.”

James grins, because god, he knows.

“Yeah. Yeah, she is.” His voice threatens to crack, and someone else might not have heard it, but this is Lucy, and Lucy does.

“She’s gonna be alright, Jimmy. I promise you. This is Alex Danvers. She’s going to be alright.”

It’s Lucy’s voice that trembles this time, but James knows better than to comment. Lucy needs to get here in one piece, and calling attention to the cracks in her armor isn’t going to help her do that.

“Yeah. Yeah, she is,” he repeats. “Fly safe, Lucy, okay?”

“Yeah. See you soon, Jimmy. Eat!”

“Yeah.”

He gives the phone back to Vasquez and plops down next to Winn.

“Feeling better?” he asks.

“I’m not gonna feel better until that girl is back here and that guy is six feet under.” James raises his eyebrows, because this is not how Winn Schott talks.

Winn notices, and he grimaces.

“I’m sorry, I just… it’s Alex, you know?”

James nods, because god, does he know. When his eyes find Winn’s next, they’re exactly as bloodshot as he imagines his own are.

“We’re going to find her, Winn.”

“But what if we’re too late?” he asks, his voice broken. His voice something like it must have sounded when they took his father away to prison. When they yelled at him in foster home after foster home after foster home. When Lyra repeated the pattern and he threw up his hands because Winn is braver than he knows, but he has terrors that only betray themselves in the defensive raising of his hands, the soft cracking of his voice, the wildly calm look in his eyes.

James puts his hand on Winn’s thigh, and the touch seems to calm him. To soothe him.

Both of them, if James is being honest.

“We won’t be. I promise. We won’t be.”

Winn nods and forces the rest of his sandwich into James’s hands. “I’m not the only one who has to keep up his strength,” he tells him, and he claps a hand on his shoulder as he stands.

“Thank you, James.”

“You’re the one doing all the work, brother.”

“I’m just playing with computers. Keeping us all together? That’s the real work, man. And you’re amazing at it.”

James sighs and he nods and he forces himself to eat.

Because Alex will never let him hear the end of it if he passes out from hunger and exhaustion when she gets back.

When.

Not if.

Because she is coming back.

Alive.