533. Chapter 533

There are double dates in the lab – Kara and Maggie letting their girlfriends shine in the only places they’d been allowed to their whole lives – and there are double dates on the beach.

There’s walking barefoot just as the surf crashes onto the sand, and there’s Kara lifting Lena into the air so that heavier waves don’t ruin her skirt, and there’s Maggie leaping onto Alex’s back, Lena and Kara laughing and egging them on, as Alex sprints, hands under Maggie’s thighs, into the waves, soaking them both and ending with very salty, very wet, very breathless kisses.

There’s Kara quietly painting portraits of the three of the women most important to her while they’re engrossed in conversation with each other, swapping stories and holding hands over parents who gaslight, parents who manipulate, parents who can shred your heart without lifting a finger, without saying a word. Parents who leave. Parents who try to love, and just cannot or will not figure out how.

There’s the first time Kara comes over to Maggie’s apartment, and the place is small, but it smells like Alex and it smells like homemade potstickers, and Lena watches as a new layer of Kara understanding Maggie washes over her, when she notices the heavy bag hanging in the corner of the room.

Lena watches Kara wonder if she should maybe invite Maggie to slam away with her and James next time she strings up a car to try and channel her anger.

There’s no plan, for most of their dates, beyond relaxing. Beyond enjoying each other. Because with the lives they lead?

Plans usually fall away regardless, and because relaxing is all too rare.

So other than food – and Alex beams with pride, with relief, when Kara’s eyes flutter closed and she moans with approval on first tasting the potstickers Maggie nervously made her – there are no plans.

No plans other than Kara laying her feet in Alex’s lap, her head in Lena’s, Maggie arching an eyebrow before crawling behind Alex, to hold her from behind, relishing the way Alex’s body melts back into hers, the way her breathing slows and her eyes shut softly.

Maggie watches the way Lena looks almost reverent as she runs her fingers through Kara’s hair, and she wonders if that’s how she looks when she runs her own fingers through her own Danvers girl’s hair.

It takes Kara a while to talk about Krypton in front of Maggie – still getting used to sharing her sister with anyone, but dating Lena makes it easier for her, somehow, because at least, now, they’re both being shared – but when she does, she shows them all the paintings she’s done over the years. The ones that she keeps under her bed because it would hurt too much to see them every day; the ones whose stories Alex knows by heart; the ones Lena holds Kara’s hand through the telling of, the ones Maggie hugs her knees into her chest and listens to with soft eyes and a slowly healing heart.

It takes Lena a while to talk in front of Maggie and Alex, but when she does, sometimes dates will abruptly end with she and Alex kissing Kara and Maggie quickly, apologetically, because this new idea can’t wait, they need to get to the lab, this will change everything; when she does, she has Alex and Maggie in stitches on the floor, screaming with laughter and cheers at her and Kara’s lively reenactments of this and that ‘Nsync music video; when she does, something stirs inside her that feels like the kind of family that has no conditions on its love.

It takes Maggie a while to talk in front of Kara, in front of Lena, in a way that’s not drippingly over-polite, that’s not waiting for Kara to tell her that she doesn’t approve, that her sister deserves better, that’s not waiting for Lena to wonder aloud why someone as brilliant and accomplished as Alex Danvers would waste her time with a lowly detective; but Lena listens to her stories with such fascination that Kara’s smile softens, and Lena tells Alex that she’s lucky to have Maggie and Alex kisses the back of her neck as she says she knows, and Kara takes a deep breath and tells Maggie that they should do this more often, the four of them, together.

And Alex?

Alex has lived for her nights alone with her sister, and she has lived for her nights alone with her girlfriend. And now, she also lives for the nights with the four of them. Because Kara is her reason for existing and Maggie got her to be herself and seeing Lena outside of the lab, outside of revolutionary biotech advances, is pure relief and pure joy, because she’s not the only one whose hair comes down at home, who has an impenetrable mask at work and the softness of a delicate flower at home, who can change the world with her brain, her brilliance, but just wants to hold and be held when the doors close and it’s just the woman she loves behind it.

So their nights together, the four of them, to just… be?

Feels exactly like what they’ve always been told family should feel like.