715. Chapter 715

The DEO medics remind her about cocoa butter, about how the scars eventually will fade.

She barely restrains herself from rolling her eyes, from reminding them that she’s got even more medical degrees than they do, that scars don’t bother her, anyway; because she’s not only a doctor.

She’s a soldier.

And soldiers have scars.

Soldiers hold on.

And she did hold on.

She held on.

Still.

Soldier or no soldier, she doesn’t sleep for weeks, after… After.

She feels guilty about it, at first, thinking she’s the one keeping Maggie up, that Maggie is merely keeping vigil over her.

Until Maggie is the one who wakes up from drifting off – her body well past its exhaustion limit – screaming about let her go, about tell me where she is, about let me switch places with her, just let her go.

They rest each other’s foreheads together, then, tears in both of their eyes and sweat on both of their brows.

“What do we do?” Alex asks, the question deceptively simple, because they were stalked, filmed, survielled, tortured.

Tortured, tortured, tortured.

“I don’t know,” Maggie whispers, finding comfort only in Alex’s arms, Alex’s lips; the steady beating of Alex’s heart.

The therapists J’onn requires both of them to see – “yes, Detective, you too; if you want to be part of the DEO enough for security clearance, you have to be part of the DEO enough for the benefits” – remind them of the importance of rituals, security, safety; consistency that is all too difficult to come by with their jobs, their lives.

Maggie asks, in a voice smaller than she’d known her voice could be, if it would hurt or help Alex to kiss the places he’d hurt, tried to hurt.

She doesn’t want to be selfish and use her lips on Alex’s body for her own comfort.

Her therapist reminds her, with gently raised eyebrows and the ghost of what might be empathetic tears in her eyes, that that’s a question only Alex can answer.

And Alex answers in the affirmative, because she needs Maggie’s lips everywhere that had been hurt.

Her shoulder scar, in particular.

Because both of them only use cash at stores, now; Winn and Kara and James have been taking turns taking their bank cards to ATMs to get them cash; because when Alex holds a credit card, a bank card, she breaks out in a cold sweat, her chest constricting like the water is back in her lungs; and when Maggie even thinks about a credit card, a bank card, she hyperventilates, wants to put her fist in the faces of any straight cis white man she comes across, she wants to scream and cry and wrap Alex in her arms and never, ever, ever let her go.

So every night, now, Maggie kisses the thin, somewhat jagged scar where Alex had sliced into her own body to save her own life.

To hold on.

Every night, Alex murmurs that she held on, and Maggie repeats it softly like a mantra. Their mantra. Their promise.

She kisses it when it’s still angry and red, stitches raised against her trembling lips.

She kisses it when it’s scabbed over and itchy and Alex grumps about having to keep it medicated.

She kisses it when it takes on a purple shade of red, becoming a smoother part of her skin, her body, her being.

She kisses it when it starts to fade, starts to blend in with the rest of her.

She kisses it the morning they get engaged – the morning of the invasion – and she kisses it two nights later, when they finally lay in bed, suddenly, somehow, engaged.

When Alex wakes up screaming Kara’s name, screaming for her father, Maggie kisses the mark that reminds them both that Alex can hold on against all odds.

When Maggie wakes up in a cold sweat, tears unconsciously tracked onto her face, about her own father, about Alex drowning, about the bodies she and James had to step over, fight over, during the Daxamite invasion, after the massacre at the bar, she kisses Alex’s scar, because it reminds them both that they have a lifetime of firsts to look forward to, to live every day for.

“I love you,” she murmurs every morning, bringing her lips to Alex’s shoulder, the morning after their wedding, wrapped up in each other, wrapped up in their love.

“I love you too,” Alex smiles, still half-asleep, still blissed out from their long night together, her fingers carding groggily through Maggie’s hair, her scar tingling underneath Maggie’s lips, because it no longer reminds them of terror; now, it reminds them of how strong their love is, and how strong it always will be.