787. Chapter 787

The first Passover that Kara spent with the Danvers family, Alex raged and screamed and threw a generally spectacular teenage fit.

Because why should Kara get to ask the questions meant to be asked by the youngest child in the family? Passover meant nothing to Kara.

Except, Kara pointed out in a small, small voice, she knew a little something about all the firstborns being slaughtered. Except, on her planet, it was everyone. Everyone who’d been born there, who was alive there. Slaughtered by a nonsensical cosmic plan that meant nothing, that changed everything.

Alex had insisted that Passover wasn’t about the slaughter of the firstborns, it was about the survival of the children who were passed over.

“Maybe it should be about both,” Kara had murmured, eyes defiant but voice, small.

And that was the first time Alex was really forced to think about justice.

Real justice, and who got to dole it out and who got to call it fair.

She thought about it more, over the years.

Losing her father.

Kara held her hand and said they could ask the questions together, the year he was first gone.

The first Passover without him. When Eliza sat at the head of the table instead of Jeremiah, and Eliza’s narration of their evening was stilted and halting where Jeremiah’s had been full of off-Haggadah commentary meant to make the girls think, meant to make the girls laugh.

Over the years, Eliza’s leadership got stronger. Alex wondered without wanting to what else her mother had been holding back all that time.

She wondered, every year, what the point of coming home for Pesach was.

She wasn’t sure what she believed anymore, anyway. She wasn’t sure if she’d ever believed, not really.

But she knew she cried every time she secured one of her father’s kippahs on her head, and she knew she cried every time she started to ask why this night was different than any other.

She knew she never wanted to sit through another Seder in her life; and she knew, in her bones, that she had to.

Even through becoming a scientist. Becoming a doctor. Becoming something like a spy, something like a soldier, something that was neither and something that was both.

She’d lost her father to supposed death.

Then she’d lost him to attempted genocide in the name of protecting his daughters.

Ironic, she decided, that he had been the one who told her, when she was young, that it was about the children who’d survived, who’d been Passed Over, rather than those who’d been killed.

Kara had been right all along.

And maybe that was the point.

She didn’t know when, exactly, their seders became healing rather than something that opened up all her festering wounds each year.

Maybe it was when Maggie started holding her hand under the table, or when Lena asked if she could help Alex write a family Haggadah, one that would reflect all of them. J’onn and Kara’s lost planets, lost peoples. Everything and everyone at their table, and beyond.

But she did know that by the time she and Maggie were inviting another Danvers woman to their Seder - Carol, this one, and her wife-but-not-wife-but-definitely-wife Maria and their daughter (their daughter) Monica - it was painful, and solemn, but somehow also joyful, and healing, and necessary.

Carol wore her crispest white buttondown to match Maria’s blouse, while Maria’s headscarf was a wash of color that match their daughter’s. And Monica had apparently - with her mom and Nick Fury’s help - made a jumper out of one of Carol’s oldest uniforms.

They all look perfect, even if Carol looks more than a little nervous, about all these people from all these Earths, and maybe one of them (Barry, she thinks his name is) can even outrun her (but not in space, she smirks), standing in Alex and Maggie’s doorway with a bottle of wine and an extra box of matza.

“All I know is, for some weird reason, the kid really likes matza and I didn’t want her to eat all of yours, so…”

“Trust me, you would’ve been doing us a favor,” Eliza laughs, and a long-haired person named Cisco immediately kneels to tell Monica how cool her outfit is, so Carol finally laughs too, because - as Maria had reminded her countless times on the way over - this may be a lot of people, but it’s family. Just family.

Just found family.

So when Alex closes her eyes and speaks of refugees and sole survivors and love that doesn’t need blood to define its boundaries, Carol watches Barry kiss Iris’s hand and Winn caress James’s knuckles. So she takes her daughter’s hand on one side and her wife’s hand on the other and lets a small, electric-like spark jolt into both of them.

She’s long since developed a language, with them, of saying ‘I love you’ with her fire-blasting hands.

And Kara had been ready with an entire array of hilarious facial expressions to keep Monica occupied - because even with Lena and Alex’s rewriting, fine-tuning, family-friendly-ing, their Haggadah still doesn’t make for the shortest Seder ever - but Monica is involved.

They all - her mothers and her found family alike - watch her learn to pass to her left and this-is-what-horseradish-tastes-like-I-don’t-wanna-say-I-told-you-so-but-didn’t-I-warn-you-about-taking-a-massive-piece and swish grape juice around in her mouth until her teeth turn somewhat purple.

And they all watch her - except for Kara, Eliza, J’onn, and Maggie, who are watching Alex - when Alex turns to her at just the right time, tears shining in her eyes.

“Sweetheart,” she says. “Lieutenant Trouble, that’s it, right?”

Monica preens. “That’s me! Although I should be getting my promotion to Captain Trouble soon.”

“Don’t you dare,” Maria warns, more her wife than their daughter, and Carol chuckles as she kisses them both in turn.

“Your moms told you about this next part, right?”

“Where I get to ask the questions,” Monica nods gravely, like she understands. Because, realistically, she does. “Should I go ahead?”

She asks not like she’s asking if it’s time, but like she’s asking Alex if she’s sure. Sure that she wants to pass on this responsibility, pass over the pain and bitterness and agony and grief she used to associate with it, and fuse it with something else. Something new. Something hopeful.

So Alex squeezes Maggie’s hand and winks across the table at her sister, and she nods.

“Go ahead, Monica.”

Her voice is small, but it is so, so sure.

“How is this night different from all other nights?” Monica asks, her voice clear and wonderous.

Everyone at the table has different answers, and everyone at the table has the same answer.

Because this night, just now, is perfect.