Chapter Text
Why is the measure of love loss?
Alex read that in a book, once, and it stuck with her for years. As a scientist, she understands the compulsion to measure, to reduce to equations, to quantify things, but she never really understood how love could be equated to loss.
Love, she reasoned, was measured by time together, the big and small of it, the holidays and birthdays, the morning coffee and the thousand insignificant text messages that mean I think about you when we’re apart, I miss you, I love you. Love had to be measured in giddiness, euphoria, and passion, not loss, loneliness, and regret.
All this theorizing happened before she fell in love, of course. Before she fell in love and lost that love.
Now she understands. The absence of love has taught her the precise dimensions of love, the weight of it, the amount she has given away, and how little she has left.
The metaphors, she realizes, the cliches, are wrong. Loss isn’t empty or hollow. It isn’t an absence. It’s a presence she drags with her throughout the day. It’s heavy, a weight on her limbs and on her heart, that she can’t lift. She can’t fling it away, casually, as she might toss a stained napkin or crumpled coffee cup.
Loss is with her, at every moment of every day. Inescapable. Ever present.
Her heart feels like it’s slowed, as if trying to stop the passage of time and keep her frozen in the moment before Maggie left. Every beat is an eternity away from love, another measure of loss.
Since Maggie left, Alex has spent the time, like the scientist she is, calibrating love. If she can get its measure, put it under a microscope and examine it, she can counteract it. Contain it.
If she can do that, maybe she can move on.
Tonight, though, moving on is the last thing on her mind.
Bright red boxes of cheap chocolates and the appearance of flowers outside of every corner store on her walk to work have haunted her all week. Kara tried to suggest alternative ‘celebrations,’ culminating in a Guy & Galentine dinner, inviting J’onn and Winn to join them. Alex pretended to run an experiment in the lab until she could sneak off alone to her apartment.
At home, in the dark, at least she can mourn in peace.
A knock sounds on the door, breaking into her thoughts. “Come in.” It’s unlocked, and she doesn't care. Her weapon is on the floor beside her, cold and black and menacing, but she doesn't reach for it. It's just her sister anyway, coming to check on her.
She doesn't open her eyes. She knows how pathetic she looks, slumped against the kitchen island with a bottle beside her, and she doesn't need to see the image she paints reflected in Kara’s eyes.
She hears the scratch of metal on the floor. Her gun, being moved away. To a safe place. Away from her. Next the bottle, scotch set on the counter. Maggie’s favorite, not hers. When a hand tightens on her glass, tries to take it from her fingers, she finally resists. She tugs it closer to her chest. “Leave it, Kara. Leave me. I'm fine, or I will be in the morning. I just need tonight.”
Fingers, soft, familiar, and not her sister’s, caress her cheek. She turns her head into the touch, the haunting smell of peaches filling her nose. Maggie’s favorite hand lotion.
“You know, I tried to leave,” a soft voice says in the darkness. “But here I am.”
“Maggie?” Alex reaches out, afraid she'll touch nothing but air, but her hand finds rough, worn leather, and above it, soft skin. Her eyes fly open.
In the darkness of her apartment, Maggie's white button down gleams, competing with the shine of tears in her eyes as the brightest thing in the room.
“What are you doing here?” Alex grips the lapel of her jacket, afraid to let go, afraid Maggie will evaporate into the ether of dreams.
“I don't really know,” Maggie confesses. She looks haggard, her cheeks hollow, her eyes dull behind the unshed tears. “I guess, I dunno…” Her words trail off, and she runs a nervous hand through her hair. “We should be spending our second Valentine's Day together, you know?” Her laugh is high, brittle. It’s the sound of pain. The sound of loss.
Maggie reaches up and snags the bottle of scotch before settling beside Alex on the floor. She takes a sip. “Since when do you leave your door unlocked?” she asks conversationally.
“I had my weapon.”
“You didn't have it ready when I walked in. You didn't even look at who came in the door.”
“I thought you were Kara.”
“I wasn’t Kara.”
“I'm not suicidal if that’s what you are thinking. I’m just…” Alex sighs. “I'm tired,” she admits.
She should be careful with her words. Precise. Measured. Calculated. But Maggie is here, the leather of her jacket creaking as she shifts to get comfortable, and Alex doesn’t know if she’ll ever get another chance to say what needs to be said. “So tired. I miss you, so much. Before you, I never knew I could be happy. Now, without you, I never knew I could hurt this much.”
They aren't touching. Maggie isn't leaning into her side or bumping their shoulders. The space of an inch feels like a chasm, a mile wide and a mile deep. Alex does nothing to close the gap, and neither does Maggie.
Maggie sighs, and the darkness magnifies the sound a hundredfold. In it, Alex can taste the depth of Maggie’s suffering. She did this. She caused Maggie pain, and her own, and for that, she will never forgive herself. She made this amazing woman feel like she wasn't enough. Again. She kicked her out of her home. Again.
Tonight, on the anniversary of that childhood trauma, Maggie came to see her.
“Why are you here?” Alex asks again.
Maggie sighs again and takes another sip of scotch. Silence mixes with darkness, deepening the black every second that passes.
At long last, Maggie speaks. “I dunno. I just… I thought I would start replacing those bad memories with good, starting this year. That we would...” She swallows, and Alex doesn't have to look to see her lip quivering in the effort to hold back tears. “I thought our second Valentine’s would be better than our first. I should have known better.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
Alex doesn’t know what Maggie could be apologizing for. She caused this, and she has no way to fix it. All the calculations and measurements in the world can’t reverse the hurt, can’t take them back to the time they were happy and in love.
“I wish…” Alex finishes her thought with a shake of her head at the impossibility of it all.
“What?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what to wish for, what to hope for. I don’t know what you being here means, Maggie.”
Maggie’s shoulder bumps hers as she shrugs. “It means I didn’t want to be alone, and I figured you might need company.” It’s simple, too simple, for the convoluted path that brought them here. They can’t just be each other’s shelter from the storm. Not now. Not anymore.
Alex holds her glass out, and, after a pause, Maggie raises the bottle to clink them together. They both sip. “You got that right,” Alex agrees. “I mean, I could have gone out with Kara, Winn, and J’onn but that… wasn’t what I needed.”
“And this is?”
Risking a sideways glance, Alex is disappointed that Maggie’s hair obscures her face. She misses her face. “Yeah. Good scotch.” She pauses before speaking the truth. “Good company. You.”
Maggie scoffs, nervously running her hand through her hair to hitch it behind her ear. Alex drinks in the view until Maggie becomes aware and returns the gaze.
“Is this what you need?” Alex asks. She fights the heaviness in her limbs to lift her arm and brush the single tear from Maggie’s cheek.
“You’ve always been all I need, Alex. All I’ve ever wanted.”
“Is that why you’re here? To tell me that?”
Maggie hides behind the bottle, bringing it to her lips for long swallow. When she lowers it, the curtain of her hair falls forward like a shroud. “I don’t know why I came. I just knew I couldn’t stay away. I’ve spent the last few months staying away, thinking it would help. But tonight, I dunno. I thought I would never be alone for Valentine’s Day again, and I figured you owed me… something. Company, at the very least.”
Alex thunks her head back, biting her lip and squeezing her eyes closed. “Of all the bad things I’ve done in my life, and let me tell you, I’ve done some doozies, hurting you was the worst. I wish there was something I could do to make up for that.”
Maggie shrugs, trying to shrug away the pain like she did a year ago with a ‘yeah, it’s whatever.’
“We wanted…” Maggie exhales sharply before trying again. “We want different things.”
“Do we?”
“You want kids, I don’t.”
That was what Alex wanted, that’s true. But she wants something different, now. She wants to stop measuring love, to stop feeling the sharp edges and precise dimensions. The abstraction of children is hard to hold when the reality of loss is right there, holding her down and slowing her heart.
It’s even harder to contemplate when the woman she’s been dreaming about every night and thinking about every day is sitting beside her.
“You are still on my speed dial, you know.” Her voice is light, a counterpoint to the weight of her words, the depth of her confession. “Every day, I have to stop myself from calling you. And every day, I think I should delete your number and force myself to move on. And every day, I don’t do either. Because if I call you, you come back into my life, and I don’t know what to do with that. And if I delete your number, then you are gone, and I can’t bear that. So you exist, on the periphery, always on my mind but never in my arms. And if I never do anything, you’ll always be there.”
“I’m the cat. In the box. Schrodinger’s cat. If you never open the box, I’m neither dead nor alive.”
Alex nods. She prefers to think of it as purgatory, absent the cleansing fire and hope for departure.
“You gotta open the box sometime. Although, frankly, I think even Schrodinger would eventually know the cat is dead by the smell of decomposition with or without opening the box, so I never really took that whole thing seriously.” Maggie laughs and swigs the bottle.
“Spoken like a true homicide detective.”
“It’s a stupid metaphor. For this, at least,” Maggie says with a shake of her head.
They lapse into silence again, and the glass is cool when Alex raises it to her lips. Leather creaks as Maggie stirs. She’s always restless unless she’s sleeping, and some things never change.
Fear grips Alex as she imagines Maggie standing, walking to the door, and leaving without hearing what she needs to hear, what Alex needs her to hear. “I know what I want.” She sighs. It’s too little, too late, but Maggie deserves to know. “I’ve been afraid to admit it, because it feels like I’m being weak. I should be strong and move on. But I want you. I know that now. I want to be happy. With you.”
“You’ve said that before.”
“I know. And I know I only get one and... I blew it. I don't deserve another chance so I'm not asking.”
Maggie huffs out a breath, shifting as she pushes herself off the floor. “I should go.”
Alex nods. Like last time, she doesn't ask her to stay, doesn’t beg her to stay, even though she wants to. It isn't her place.
Maggie hesitates, halfway to the door. She reaches into her back pocket and pulls something out. She sets it on the island and walks resolutely out the door. She doesn't look back.
Alex struggles to get her feet under her, pinpricks of blood rushing into her feet where she's sat on the floor too long. It's a card. A cheap child’s valentine’s card in a thin white envelope, like kids stick in elaborately decorated shoe boxes in grade school.
“Be mine.”
