Chapter Text
A chest rises and falls in time with the steady rhythm of the heart monitor. The girl lies on the medical gurney, curled around a stuffed otter. She can’t be older than five years old, and in her slumber, is unaware that she’s in the DEO.
With a sigh, Alex pulls the standard military issue cover over her shoulders. The powder blue blanket drowns the tiny sleeping frame. She lingers for a moment, watching the girl’s brow twitch in sleep, then turns back to her workstation.
The alert that had sounded hours earlier had shaken her to her core. Brainy’s systems detected an unidentified object travelling between worlds, ripping open a portal near the south entrance to Belmont Park. It was a busy afternoon, and even though the DEO squad had raced there, dozens of civilians had gotten eyes on it.
Honestly, she’s still having trouble wrapping her head around what had happened. This was a common scenario that they had protocols and contingency plans for— they’re no strangers to Barry Allen’s poorly timed interdimensional escapades now— but the origin of the object was unclear.
Alex hadn’t been in the field since J’onn had bestowed upon her the title of DEO Director, and her trigger finger had itched with the urge to be fighting by Kara’s side once more, so she found herself strapping on her tactical gear. If the unidentified object turned out to be dangerous, they’d need their best agent to contain it in a populated city park.
They had approached the still-smoking crater armed to the teeth, but what they found wasn’t hostile— at least not straightaway. All that was there was a silver pod, much like the one Kara had crash-landed in all those years ago.
She’d signaled the task force to stand down as she pried off the top. Once she registered what was inside, she immediately holstered her own weapon. Here was a girl in a deep sleep— the same girl she’s running tests on now.
Her initial suspicion was that the child was Kryptonian, or Daxamite, judging by the style of the pod and the humanoid appearance, but that hypothesis had been debunked the minute the collection needle easily slipped past her skin and straight into a vein. The girl is human. The first blood test had confirmed that. Now there is just the matter of determining the origin of her craft so they can send her back to her own Earth.
A whimper draws her attention back to her patient, whose brow crinkles as she presses her nose further into the fur of her stuffed companion. Alex scoots her chair back over towards her young charge, glad that she’d had the foresight to pull the toy from the wreckage of the girl’s craft before sending it to Brainy for analysis.
The girl whimpers once more, seemingly lost in a nightmare, and Alex reaches out to her without thinking, running her hand along the girl’s back. Maybe it is the similarity in the pods, but she remembers tiptoeing out of bed to do the same thing for a younger Kara when she was first adjusting to Earth.
It’s also what her father used to do when she would wake up crying as a child. What Maggie used to do when she would be thrown from sleep at three am, covered in sweat and gasping for breath.
Nightmares tug her stream of consciousness away even further. Ever since the tank, her sleep has been restless, but last night, she hadn’t dreamt of the chill of the water surrounding her or the feeling of her lungs burning.
Instead she dreamt of fire.
Her world was burning.
Their neighbours fled their houses, arms laden with trinkets and treasures, even though they all knew that there was really nowhere to run. Their fate was sealed.
It was an otherworldly scene. Meteorites rained down from the sky, turned a bright orange from the smoke particles rising through the air. She could feel the heat licking at her skin, could hear the screaming all around her, and then… a voice rising above the din.
“We did the right thing.”
It was her voice, her tongue like sandpaper against the roof of the mouth, parched by the heat.
“We did. She’s safe.” The image of Maggie swam in front of her, solidifying until she was standing before her. Sweat slicked their hair to their temples. “We did the right thing.”
She reached out, fingers brushing Maggie’s cheek, sliding through the damp perspiration. She wanted to be closer. Needed to be closer.
“I love you, so much. Forever.”
She could see the flames glimmering against the tears in Maggie’s eyes, smell the scorching soil under her feet. If they were going to burn, it was together.
“I’ll see you in the next one, Danvers-”
The girl stirs, reaching out for Alex, grasping at the lapels of her lab coat and mumbling something that sends a shockwave coursing through her. Mommy .
It must be a mistake. Just a young child, half-asleep, trying to find some kind of comfort in a strange land.
She lifts herself away and moves back to her workstation. She tries to dislodge the grip on her throat that comes with remembering Maggie in any way, even if it is in a cryptic dream.
But that dream...
Why, after so many months of crying into Kara’s shoulder at sister nights, of the string of first dates, of finally thinking that she could move on with her life, is she dreaming about Maggie? Moreover, why is she dreaming about them dying in flames, in a world on fire?
It had seemed too real. Too vivid. She just can’t shake the feeling like there’s something more to it. It’s like she’s staring at a puzzle with a missing final piece.
The door to the Medical Bay swings open and Brainy appears, a flashdrive in hand. “Director Danvers, I’ve come across some video files while gathering data from the pod that was recovered.”
“Excellent work.” She takes the offered drive and stands, her joints cracking from being hunched over for so long. “Please keep me updated.”
He gives her a curt nod and disappears once more. Her patient has gone back to sleep, so she flicks half of the lights off and retreats across the hall to the small office adjacent to her lab— the one she refused to give up, even when offered the use of J’onn’s larger one on the main level. She loads the first file on her computer and nearly gasps when the image fills the screen.
It’s her.
It’s her and-
Her doppelganger is sitting next to Maggie, her hand on the other woman’s knee. They’re sitting calmly, but the way the other Alex’s voice cracks when she speaks tells her that they’re struggling not to cry.
“You’re probably wondering what the hell you’re looking at...Well…” Alex waves at the pair of them. “About six months ago we got readings that our sun was acting erratically, sending out bursts of solar energy. We were getting scorching heat waves, and the climate destabilised and...anyway, we did all we could, as a planet I mean, but…”
“But there’s nothing else we can do. Except wait it out.” Maggie finishes.
Alex nods resolutely. “Right. So here’s the thing…”
Maggie takes her hand, squeezing her fingers. “We know this is a lot to ask, but Jamie - uh, our daughter, she’s just a kid. She’s four years old.”
“She deserves to live a full, happy life. She doesn’t deserve to die with us—”
Caught up in that bombshell statement, they pause to share a look that is equal parts hope and anguish, then Alex clears her throat and looks directly at the camera.
“So we’re sending her to you.”
Maggie leans in closer to Alex, winding an arm around her waist. “Please, please love her. Care for her. She deserves a chance. Love her as much as we do.”
“That’s all we ask, please. Because we can’t, not with the world about to...to end.”
The video cuts to black. Maggie and her double disappear, leaving the room with only the hum of the computer. Alex stares at her own reflection in the black monitor. If the video she just watched is real, this child— the child that is lying in her lab on a medical bed— is hers.
Hers and Maggie’s.
She lurches back in her seat, her mind ablaze with questions. She reaches up to the collar of her suit, toying with it, as if it were choking her.
Was the child genetically related to them? Did that technology even exist on their Earth? How could she even confirm that?
With each one she becomes more distant; each question a step away from reality and into deafening shock.
Leaving her office, she runs right into Brainy in the hall. She stumbles back, the shock scattering her attention away from him and at a thousand trivial details. The quiffed style of his hair, the blinkered light overhead that needs urgent fixing, the colour of Agent Travers’ laces not being DEO uniform protocol-
She can’t get a grip on reality. Not with-
“I found something quite strange.” He pokes at the data pad in his hand, trying to draw her focus. “The origin point of the portal jump is no longer fixed. It was 5 years into the future and on a separate timeline to ours, but now it appears to no longer exist.”
5 years into the future. A separate timeline. A fixed origin point that no longer physically exists.
Hellfire raining down, scorching the Earth; her dream becoming reality. Alex swallows the lump in her throat, pushing past him. “That’s because it doesn’t.”
She stops in front of the Medical Bay window and peers through the glass. Brainy hands her the datapad wordlessly, hovering for a few seconds longer, before turning and marching off.
Numb, she looks down at the datapad and flicks through various reports, but she’s not really taking in any of the information. She’s too distracted by the fact that the girl now sitting up on the gurney could presumably share 50 percent of her DNA.
(And 50 percent of Maggie’s, but she isn’t ready to deal with that right now).
The girl— Jamie , she corrects herself— is awake and chattering to her stuffed otter, and if Alex leans close enough to the glass, she can just about make out what she’s saying.
“No one will talk to me,” Jamie laments. She looks around the space, and whispers, “I think they’re mad at me, but I don’t know what I did wrong.” She dances the otter this way and that, and then cradles him close to her chest. She lets out a big sigh, rubbing her cheek on his head. “What did I do, Pickles?”
Alex’s heart seizes, and then stutters back into a normal rhythm. Jamie doesn’t seem perturbed by the fact that she’s in the DEO, which only provides more evidence that the claims made in that video were true. She’s used to being there because she spends time there with her mom. With her.
When Alex had carried an unconscious Jamie into the Medical Bay, she’d told the other agents to keep clear of the area, but now she thinks that may have not been the best idea. Jamie knows these agents on her Earth.
This girl is her daughter.
This girl-
Alex’s train of thought is delivering her realisation after realisation, putting together connections she didn’t know she should have been looking for. She presses a palm against the glass of the Medical Bay, leaning into it like each revelation is sapping her of strength.
This is the reason Jamie expects the other agents to talk to her, the reason she called out Mommy when she stirred, the reason she recognises the girl’s features… she’s hers.
A voice floats in from her right, announcing an arrival, “I heard there was a…”
Kara stops dead in her tracks as she catches sight of the girl on the medical table. “Oh, she’s adorable!”
Alex pries her hand off the glass, seeing the smudges left by her fingerprints. She can see her sister smiling in her peripheral vision. Supergirl had been in Gotham helping a colleague and hadn’t been there for the alert, but when Alex had notified her that the pod appeared to be Kryptonian in origin, she’d come rushing back.
She’d known it was a longshot that there was another survivor of Krypton, but still, Alex thought it was her duty to inform Kara there was even a chance.
She had been so far off the mark.
“Kara,” Alex says, shuffling some money out of her wallet, “I need you to go to the store and get some stuff for this kid. Food, pyjamas, clothes, anything you can think of. Take it to my apartment.”
Kara looks a little blankly at the money, then takes it. “You’re taking her out of here?”
“Yeah.”
She has to. The Alex and Maggie from that doomed Earth had sent their daughter to her because they believed that she would protect her and care for her. She owes it to them and to Jamie to step up. To adjust quicker than she’s ever had to before.
She doesn’t know how to begin, to take this first step, but she has to walk forward regardless.
She’ll have to tell Maggie somehow, but for now, Jamie needs her.
She catches Kara’s eye through her reflection on the window glass. Her sister seems baffled at Alex's curtness. “Did you find out who she is?”
“Yeah.”
Alex’s mouth quirks up in an involuntary smile as Jamie nuzzles into Pickle’s fuzzy ear, letting herself sink back to reality, letting Kara stew for just a few seconds longer. And then-
“She’s mine.”
~
She doesn’t get a lot of visitors. She hasn’t even updated her file at the NCPD to reflect the address of her new studio apartment. It’s only been a few months since the breakup and while she may have packed her things into boxes and moved them halfway across town, making that last change feels too final.
When a knock comes to her door in the middle of an otherwise standard evening, she’s immediately curious. A neighbour? A stranger who’s lost their way? A salesman?
She hopes it’s not the latter.
Or she did, until she sees who it is through the peephole.
Automatically, she unlocks the door and opens it, staring blankly at her visitor.
“Hey,” Alex greets her, as if the last time they spoke hadn’t been through tears.
“Hey.” Maggie nervously palms her hips, pulse racing as panic eclipses her rationale. The urge to scream builds as she takes in those doe eyes, that faint perfume. The very presence of Alex tilts the axis of her world. Yet all she musters is: “Is everything, uh, alright?”
“Actually, no.” Alex adjusts the strap of her laptop bag, peering up through her eyelashes. “Is it okay if I come in?”
Against the warning from every fibre of her being, Maggie motions for her to enter. She knows it was inevitable that she would run into Alex sometime— the DEO and NCPD work seamlessly together, because of, and in spite of, their own partnership— but this isn’t a crime scene. It isn’t neutral territory. They aren’t playfully fighting over jurisdiction anymore. Their first interaction in months is on her own turf, and yet Maggie feels like she’s at a distinct disadvantage.
Alex has always had a way of making her feel vulnerable.
She shuts the door behind her, and is about to offer a drink, but Alex is already rummaging through her laptop case and pulling out a stack of files.
It’s business then.
“There was an incident a few days ago. Actually, over a week ago,” Alex declares, setting out neat piles of paper, “I think you have a right to know.”
“To know what?”
Alex straightens, turns, and draws her bottom lip between her teeth. “Ten days ago, an unidentified object crash-landed in National City. It’s- the pod we found- it’s not from this universe. There was a girl inside, she’s only four and well… she’s lost.”
Maggie recognises the pattern of her speech; she’s dancing around something, building up to it. She’s practised the tale over and over, that much is clear, but she’s too afraid to tell it now.
“Okay…?” Maggie prods Alex to continue, “This girl, who is she?”
“She's…” Alex chews at her lip and looks to the figures on the paperwork to ground her. She won’t look Maggie in the eye. “She’s our daughter.”
Maggie’s consciousness comes screeching to a halt. That urge to scream releases immediately into a gasp; “ Excuse me?”
“Not... ours , another version of us,” Alex clarifies, holding out a flat palm as if she’s afraid Maggie might attack her, “Of you and me. We- They had a child. And she…”
She pauses and frowns, the skin between her eyebrows crinkling as she searches for the words.
“Their planet died, like Krypton did. There was a huge solar flare from their Sun, and well, there were no survivors. Except one.”
Maggie’s shock clears all at once, like how fresh air sobers her after an hour in a bar. She knows Kara’s story, knows about Krypton. She finally realises what Alex is trying to tell her.
A planet engulfed in a hail of fire from an unstable star, desperate parents sending their child away in the hope they would have a chance at life, a different universe with people just like them.
A dying planet. Desperate parents. One survivor.
“The kid.”
Alex dips her chin in confirmation. “The kid.”
A dead planet, no parents, a lone survivor.
It’s almost a mercy, the fact that she’s so young. Maybe she would be free of the scars Maggie herself bore from losing her own home as a child. Maybe she doesn’t even know.
“The video message they left in the pod… it was dated 2024. They said sending her back in time was safer than forward or linear. I ran tests because it was crazy. I couldn’t believe it.” Alex presses her lips together, quelling the ramble, and then, “But she’s human.”
Maggie props her hands on her hips and tries to ground herself through the balls of her feet. She stretches her sternum up as if she is trying to suppress a painful stitch after a sprint, but her stomach tightens and tightens until she has to swing her hands away with the tension. She laces them together, unlaces them, wrings them, circles her wrists.
She sees Alex eyeing her anxious idiosyncrasies, and self-consciously plants her hands back on her hips. “There’s more, isn’t there?”
Alex rifles through the paperwork she’s brought, all on official DEO letterhead. Maggie recognises the layout— they’re lab tests.
“Here,” Alex mumbles, handing out a thin bundle held together with a single paperclip.
Maggie takes it without comment. Alex’s agent number is listed on the page, as is her own DEO identification number. She recognises it from when it had been added to the system after Hank Henshaw shot her.
Alex had to know the truth. Had to run the tests, to prove her hypothesis. These are DNA results laid out in front of her. And she’s seen enough of them in her own line of work to know what each of the matching alleles means.
Her heart pounds. She scans the two numbers again and again, mouthing over each digit, checking that they’re correct. Her number, and Alex’s, from the DEO registry. Then the graphs, sees the matching results. Back to the numbers, to the peaks on the electropherogram.
Only when Alex speaks does the truth actually sink in.
“She’s ours, Maggie. One hundred percent.”
Maggie doesn’t reply. The numbers and lines on the page are all blurring together. She understands what it all means, but she’s still struggling to comprehend.
“I don’t know how they did it or, well…” Alex trails off, caught up in the science of it. “She’s ours, biologically .”
Biologically.
In place of a real reaction, idle thoughts flicker through her mind. Did she carry the girl? Did Alex? She can’t picture herself pregnant, but she never pictured herself as a mother either and here she is. She can see a lab, a petri dish, an excited Alex Danvers spinning a version of her around. And morning sickness, but continuing health, and all of those things she had been prepared to promise at an altar.
On their first trip to Midvale together, Alex had pulled her up to the roof to watch the stars. Stargazing had never been so romantic in Blue Springs; while the stars weren’t quite as bright over Alex’s childhood home, Alex did her best to fill in the gaps in each constellation with her words. They laughed and kissed and cuddled, but then Alex had grown solemn as her finger hovered over one specific star shining off in the distance.
Rao .
She’d known Kara was Supergirl early on, but she hadn’t wanted to press Alex on the details of their sisterhood. She knew what it was like to have secrets. All she could do was wait for Alex to open up to her. Sure enough, that night, as they lay together under the stars bearing their souls to one another, Alex opened up about how Kara came to live with them.
In another life, she and Alex made the same decision as Zor-El and Alura, to send their daughter off through time and space, to another version of themselves that they hoped would love her and care for her.
There’s a photo of the girl’s pod in Alex’s stack of papers. It’s only big enough to fit a human girl no older than Kindergarten-age, and silver too, clearly reminiscent of Kara’s own Kryptonian ship. She traces the photograph, the glyphs on the side, wondering about the design. Did the other Alex design it? Was she just as brilliant as the Alex standing before her? Questions were swimming around and fogging her away from her shock.
“I’m not going to force you into anything you don’t want,” Alex announces, gentle but resolute, pulling Maggie out of her shock-induced fog and back to the present, “But you deserved to know. And I-I’m gonna care for her. Raise her.”
“Alex, that’s huge,” she says, voice gravelly.
“It is, but I want this. I’ve...been thinking about kids ever since our break up.” She pauses out of respect, of acknowledgement between them as if it’s for a fallen colleague. “I’m not fooling myself. This won’t be easy.”
The determination in her voice cuts Maggie to the core. The results of the DNA tests are still clutched in her hands, almost ready to tear. She looks again to the picture of the pod in the DEO processing bay, as if it will give her strength to continue.
“Can I think about this?” It comes out more like a croak.
“Maggie, you don’t have-”
“No, just...this is a lot,” she rushes to assure Alex, “I need time before I decide anything.”
Alex nods and packs up her things, the picture of the pod swept back away into her bag.
The pod, the girl. She realises what’s missing from her picture.
“Alex?”
Alex stops at the door, hand on the handle. “Yeah?”
Maggie can’t look her in the eye. “What’s she like?”
Alex rustles around in her bag again, and produces the print. “Here she is.”
She takes the photo, sees the lines from where the printer had been running low on ink— a printed page, as if Alex thought she wouldn’t want the inconvenience of a message in her inbox, as if the physicality of the paper would be more proof that this is real.
“What's her name?” she asks, almost inaudible.
“Jamie.”
Jamie.
She has always liked that name.
She’s sitting with Supergirl in the photo, their cheeks pressed together, sporting matching grins.
Maggie sees it. The eyes and around her hairline are Alex, but her cheeks, smile, and nose are all Maggie.
The door softly clicks but Maggie is there, frozen, staring into the face of her daughter.
~
“I want to meet her.”
“Maggie…”
It takes her two whole weeks to call Alex back to her apartment. In that time, a thousand emotions had crashed against her bow each day.
Sometimes she wanted to roar down the phone, or storm the DEO, ask why Alex hadn’t called her there on the first day. Demand to see this child from the photograph that by now had wrinkles from her handling it.
Sometimes she awoke with icy fear in her stomach and wanted to pack everything, grab a flight, and run away from her life. She could forget her career, her past, start again somewhere new.
Sometimes she wanted to lock herself in an interview observation room, listening to countless footsteps go up and down the corridor outside or the buzz of the fluorescent lights bearing down on the empty table and chairs.
But she didn’t do any of those things. She forced herself through every howling reaction trying to process through the emotion to get to the logic. Eventually the storm calmed, and then she called Alex.
And now she stands at at her apartment window, watching as the dusk fades behind the hulking skyscrapers. The sun is dimmed to an orange glow, bringing out the whiskey tones in Alex’s eyes, and she finds it easier to stare out at the National City skyline than risk getting caught up in them.
And this kid, their kid. She has Alex’s eyes. Does the sun bring out those same honey and whiskey tones in hers?
Those are the kind of questions that have been ringing in Maggie’s ears over the last two weeks.
“Please. I’ve been thinking about this, a lot.” She runs her hands up her own biceps, providing the comfort part of her still longs for from the other woman. “And I...I want to meet her.”
Behind her, Alex sighs. Maggie doesn’t blame her; it has been two weeks with no contact, the ball firmly in Maggie’s court. She had worried Alex might think her selfish for taking all of that time, but now she senses wariness at the decision that has been reached.
After seeing her almost-wife after seven months and then hearing that they have a child together, she needed time to grapple with the enormity of the situation, time to battle through every stupid human thought that raced through her mind.
“When you meet her, she’s gonna think you’re her mother, Maggie.” Alex sounds tired, like she’s been up for two days straight on an op, and Maggie wonders if she’s getting enough sleep. “She’s gonna think she’s known you her whole life. It won’t be a first meeting for her.”
Finally, Maggie turns, lifting her head. “I understand.”
“She thinks...you’ve been busy at work.” Alex twitches, as if afraid this was the wrong thing to say, and then presses on when no rebuke comes. “That’s why you haven’t been around.”
“Alex,” she stresses the name, “I want to meet her. I want to...try.”
Alex’s hesitation is palpable, the quiet stretching out to fill the room. Unable to hold her stare, Maggie turns back and rests her forehead against the windowpane. Faintly, she can hear the honks and rumbles of the evening traffic. The lines of frustration winding around the city, holding it in a choke hold for the duration of the rush hour, and yet not as suffocating as the silence in her own apartment.
There used to be a time when she and Alex could sit in silence as they both worked, the small touches and gentle smiles all the communication that was needed. They were so close then.
“Okay.” A pause, the vulnerability of a single word shaking the moment. “I need you to try , okay? I mean really try.”
“Yeah.”
They agree to meet at the small park near Alex’s apartment. The apartment they used to share. Now the dresser drawers that once held her button downs and jeans were likely taken up by much smaller clothing.
She’s early, partly out of habit, partly from nerves, so she sits on a bench across from the jungle gym and waits. A light summer breeze carries laughter from the swingset as two girls dare each other to go higher and higher, their parents watching nearby. Her palms are sweaty as she rubs them together.
“Mommy!” The voice rings out over the chirping of the birds.
She’s been called many things, but Mommy has never been one of them. She should have no reason to turn, no reason to recognize that voice, but somehow she does. It’s so familiar in a way that she just can’t explain and the instant she hears it, she knows it’s her daughter.
Alex had been firm when they’d set up the meeting. She didn’t want to get Jamie’s hopes up, so if Maggie wanted to meet their daughter, she had to be willing to make a commitment. This wasn’t a trial run. There was no room for error.
She takes a deep breath to calm her shaking hands, and then turns towards the girl barrelling towards her. Instinctively she kneels down, and catches the girl in her arms.
“Mommy,” the girl breathes, burying her head into Maggie’s shoulder, squeezing as tightly as her tiny arms can manage. “I missed you so much.”
As Maggie holds Jamie for the first time, any part of her that had remained unconvinced by Alex’s story or the genetic test or even the photograph is silenced. This girl is real and solid and her daughter.
She feels Alex’s eyes on them, but all she can focus on is the tiny child burrowing further into her embrace, before pulling back and bouncing on her toes. Maggie gets a good look at her face, drinking in the details, reaching up to carefully push back the curtain of dark hair.
Jamie is babbling so quickly that Maggie can only catch every third word, but the girl is clearly thrilled to see her. Finally, she repeats her earlier phrase, “I missed you so much.”
“Yeah,” Maggie chokes, “but I’ve been catching bad guys.”
Nodding solemnly, Jamie takes Maggie’s words and treats them as if they are of utmost importance. As if she understands the hardships Maggie often faces in her job. Then, like a switch has been flipped, her face lights up and Maggie is met with a smile that she has only seen reflected back at her in the mirror. Her double— dimples and all.
“Watch me on the slide!” she exclaims, eyes gleaming with excitement.
The girl is off in a flash and Maggie stands, brushing dirt off of the knees of her jeans. Shielding her eyes from the afternoon sun, she watches as Jamie scrambles up the steps of the slide and— after checking to see that she’s got her mother’s attention— gleefully slides down, only to run back to the steps to repeat the whole process.
“Hey,” she finally addresses Alex as she collapses back down on the park bench next to her.
“Hey, you.” The greeting is friendly but guarded, and Maggie feels every bit like a specimen under a microscope slide. She knows Alex is looking for any hesitation on her part, any chance that she might slip up. Her earlier warnings echo through Maggie’s head.
But she can’t dwell on that. Not when Jamie’s giggles ring out across the playground— a sound that could make even J’onn J’onzz break out into a broad smile.
She shakes her head in wonder. “She’s…real.”
Alex smiles contentedly, watching as Jamie climbs up the steps once more. “Yeah. The last two weeks have been a lot of learning.”
“Learning, huh?” Maggie repeats.
“Oh yeah. I’ve gotten splashed in punishment for not knowing the bath time song, I’ve woken up to tiny hands slapping at my cheeks at 3am, and I’ve already had to replace a vase that got knocked over by a game of tag.”
Despite the static tension humming around them, as if a single second of eye contact would give them a jolt, Maggie laughs. If these playful anecdotes were supposed to be hidden cautions, she doesn’t accept them as such.
The little girl skips across the playground, her sneakers lighting up with each footfall. Clearly Kara has had some influence on her wardrobe. She’s actually fairly surprised Jamie isn’t clad in Supergirl merchandise from head to toe. Instead she’s wearing a blue shirt with a cartoon German Shepherd.
“Paw Patrol, huh?” She’s seen the dog before. One of the boys down at the station has a son who just celebrated his fifth birthday with a party themed after the show, much to his father’s annoyance.
“She uh, loves it. We’ve been watching a lot of it. The police dog is her favorite.”
Again, the comment is pointed. Jamie idolizes her mother- idolizes her . The idea fills her with a kind of pride that she’s never felt before.
And later, when she gets up to push Jamie on the swings, her daughter’s laughter ringing in her ears, she begins to understand why Alex wanted to take on this responsibility. She spies Alex watching their interactions with a kind of suspicion, like the situation could spiral into danger and she is preparing to spring into action at any given second. She bites the inside of her cheek, pushing down the anger in favour of telling herself that Alex has plenty of reason to be cautious.
When Jamie tires of the swings, Maggie offers to buy the three of them ice cream. Rather than sit with her and Alex at the edge of the sandbox, she immediately runs back off to eat her chocolate and vanilla swirl cone on the top of the play structure.
“I’d like to think it’s been seamless, but it really has been tough. She’s trying to adjust to my apartment, rather than her house on that other Earth. I think I might swap apartments with Kara, have more room.” Alex licks a stray trickle of quickly melting ice cream off of the side of her cone, glancing for Maggie’s reaction. “I’m trying really hard to be as good as the other me. To get up to speed as fast as I can, y’know?”
“I want to help.” Maggie turns to face her and cuts to the quick. All afternoon Alex has been given her coded hints that she has a chance to back away if she thinks she can’t handle the bad days, the downsides, the struggles of being a mother to a young girl. She resists the urge to place a reassuring hand on her ex-fiancé's knee. “I want to be a part of this, Alex. This is just as much my responsibility as it is yours.”
Alex stares for a long time, and then gazes over at Jamie, still perched at the top of the play structure. Then she nods sharply.
“Okay,” she says, “Okay.”
Maggie bids goodbye to Alex and a teary-eyed Jamie, kneeling down to her daughter’s level once more to gather her into a tight hug. Jamie nods between sniffles as Maggie recites the cover story she and Alex created, but guilt settles low in her belly the entire ride back to her apartment. She’s her daughter’s hero, but instead of being at home with her, she’s sitting alone on her cheap thrifted couch.
Alex had slipped a USB drive into her hand before they’d parted ways at the park, but now that she’s staring at the folder of home videos, she can’t bring herself to watch them. She’s curious, yes. How could she not be? But that detective’s curiosity is tempered by trepidation— by fear of what she might find. Those videos feel like the last piece of the puzzle. The last bit of evidence needed to crack the case wide open.
She hovers the mouse over the files, but then closes the laptop lid.
~
Maggie visits a few times each week. Despite her hesitance, she had made a promise to Alex and Jamie and she fully intends to keep it.
It’s just the three of them at first. Sometimes Maggie brings them breakfast— she never forgot Alex’s coffee order— and they watch cartoons on the couch before Maggie has to go to the station. Other times Jamie settles on her lap with a book while Alex does laundry or has a much deserved nap.
The first time Kara joins them, it’s a surprise. As she plays a game with her niece, Maggie listens to them, and realises that Kara knows things about her daughter that she doesn’t.
She is still learning day by day, trying to slowly fit herself into the picture. But true to her nature, Kara breezes in and already seems to knows the routines, the prompts. She doesn’t slip up where Maggie does, doesn’t have to correct herself or question as much.
She knows that Jamie likes the crusts cut off her sandwiches— except if they’re peanut butter and jelly.
She suspects that Kara has seen the videos, the ones that taunt Maggie from her desktop. The curl of jealousy that weaves through her is irrational, Kara is the girl’s aunt after all, but she can’t help but feel its burn.
That tips her scales dramatically, and she sits down that night to watch them all.
It’s like an episode of the Twilight Zone, staring at a woman that shares her face, waving at the camera, a baby in her lap. Another her. Another life.
In the second video, a baby Jamie toddles forward, away from the camera and towards a smiling Alex. They’re in Midvale, Maggie recognizes Eliza’s favorite blue rug from the living room. Her own voice emanates from behind the camera, cheering her on. Jamie’s first steps.
Each video is a new scene of domestic bliss— a life she never imagined herself having; and with each one of Jamie’s firsts, she’s filled with a sense of wonder and loss. These women gathering around their daughter on her bed, teaching her to read, will never see another first. They’ll never see her first day of school or see her learn to ride a bike.
They’ll never be around to see Jamie grow up.
She opens the last video to shaky footage. She can hear Kara, who must be holding the camera, creeping around the house, dodging discarded toys like she’s walking through a minefield. The camera sweeps over a sleeping Jamie, laying on her back, sound in her slumber.
Kara coos, spinning the little rocketship mobile above the crib, before sneaking into the next room. The camera zooms in on two sleeping figures. Alex and Maggie are sprawled out on the couch, limbs entwined, mouths wide open. They’re clearly exhausted, catching sleep when they can. The camera pans back to the baby, her mouth wide open.
“Like daughter, like mothers,” Kara says and the video fades to black.
She leans away from her laptop, sucks in a deep breath. She’s sure now.
She needs to be a part of her daughter’s life. She wasn’t there for so many of her firsts, but she wants to be there for the rest of them.
Jamie has lost two parents who adored her to the ends of the Earth, and she’s going to make sure that she never knows it. There will never be another gap- another absence of love and affection again.
Any hesitation about easing her way into Alex and Jamie’s life is dropped. All her tentativeness is cleansed.
When Jamie opens Kara’s apartment door, Maggie sweeps her up, coaxing a rattle of giggles out of the girl. She carries Jamie to the island, where Alex is looking at her warily.
“How would you feel about a trip to the zoo today?” Maggie asks by way of a hello .
Jamie's eyes go huge and hopeful. “Really?”
“If your other mommy says it’s okay…” Maggie gives Alex a coy look. “Well?”
“Please,” Jamie begs, “Please, please, please!”
Alex blooms into a smile, flattening her palms against her hips. “Yeah,” she says, nodding, “That sounds like a great idea.”
Even as Jamie's triumphant cry leaves her left ear ringing, Maggie is focused on the relieved slump of Alex's shoulders.
Progress.