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“Smile!”
“No, Kara!”
Maggie laughs, rolling over on the couch and holding her open case file over her face. Everyone else bursts into laughter as the maneuver nearly sends her rolling off the couch, and Alex lunges over to make sure her girlfriend doesn’t fall.
Kara lowers her camera, a pout already in place, but Maggie’s just as quick, sitting up and waving a finger in front of the lens.
“Not tonight, little Danvers,” she says, sticking out her tongue in response to the childish look Kara sends her. “I agreed to come to game night but I told you I had work to do.”
“But, Maggie-”
“Let her work, Kara,” Alex says, tossing a pillow in Kara’s general direction and getting dangerously close to hitting Winn instead. Ignoring Winn’s startled shouts, Alex scoots back into Maggie’s side, wrapping an arm around the detective’s waist.
“Thanks,” Maggie whispers as the ruckus around them dies down and the others return to the game.
“No problem,” Alex whispers back.
“If I’m quick, I’ll probably be able to finish this and we can get a round of cards in before we go. Sound good?”
“I’ll leave you to it, then,” Alex says, kissing Maggie quickly on the nose before turning away slightly and giving Maggie space to work. Alex wants nothing more than to intertwine her fingers with Maggie’s right now, and give their friends a good solid thrashing to keep up their winning streak from the past few game nights… but it was Alex who had distracted Maggie from her work that afternoon, so Alex sits back and fails at pretending not to be completely distracted by watching Maggie read out of the corner of her eye.
Normally, it’s James who takes all the candid photos on their nights together, but Kara’s gotten her hands on one of his digital cameras and has spent the better part of the evening filling up his memory card instead of using her abundance of Polaroids. Alex grins, watching Kara take a sneaky shot of Winn with half a chip hanging out of his mouth and James laughing in the background.
“That’s a good shot, Kara,” James manages, after he’s finally managed to control his laughter and start breathing again.
Kara beams, and Kara clambers over the furniture, ignoring James’s shouts of “Be careful with that, Kara!”, and practically falls into Alex’s lap, reaching up to show her sister the camera display.
“Cute,” Alex snorts, because her friends are all goofballs, but it is a good photo, a perfect capture of the careless joy that comes of their game nights, and Alex thinks of the albums tucked away in Kara’s bedroom, all the photos accumulated from her years on Earth. Alex thinks of most of her favorite photos of herself, the ones Kara took when Alex wasn’t looking, when Alex was pouring over a book or going through equations, the ones where Alex had globs of cookie dough on her nose and was in the middle of laughing with Jeremiah and Eliza, the one or two photos Kara has of Alex suddenly picking Maggie up in the middle of a dispute about a game, where they’re spinning in circles until Alex got dizzy and had to drop Maggie back onto the couch.
Kara leaves, and Alex sneaks a look over at her girlfriend. Maggie’s chewing on her bottom lip in thought, and it takes her a minute or two to look up and catch Alex’s gaze.
“What?” Maggie asks, grinning because Alex looks like she’s somewhere else completely. “Seriously, Alex, what?”
But Alex just smiles, and wraps her arm a little more securely around Maggie’s waist, and gives her a quiet, “Hurry up and finish your reading so we can kick some ass.”
And Maggie lets the corner of her mouth turn up, and glances back down at her file with a “Yes, ma’am”.
Maggie is completely done with Alex by noon the next day.
“Alex, please, I just got out of bed.”
“A-lex, I literally have milk dribbling down my chin, can’t you wait until after breakfast.”
“These files are classified, camera away, Danvers.”
“Babe, what am I even going to do with you?”
And Alex just looks up from her lab reports (and her phone screen) and shoots Maggie a grin.
“I just want to have all these little moments of you, to have whenever, you know, so we can look back years from now or whatever,” Alex says, aware that she sounds cheesy as hell and that there’s really no way to save herself. She flicks through her camera roll, and tilts her phone towards Maggie.
Maggie, who just rolls her eyes at the picture of herself beaming even as she’s flying out of bed to tackle Alex to the ground, but whose heart is slowly melting because this. She doesn’t really have more than a handful of photos with any of her exes, didn’t really care either way, but there’s something so unbearably precious about how even before today, Alex has already changed her home and lock screens to photos with Maggie, and that she’s tagging Maggie in just about every other photo she posts on Instagram.
… something unbearably precious about how Alex wants them to have these to look back on, years from now.
That Alex believes they’ll make it, and still be together years from now.
Maggie Sawyer doesn’t believe in a lot of things, but she believes that she could and will be happy, spending the rest of her life with the woman in front of her.
So Maggie doesn’t roll her eyes this time, when she catches Alex taking a photo when she takes a moment to glance out the window. Maggie sneaks out her own phone a few times during the day, to take photos of Alex going through her fridge, napping on the couch, leaping up from the couch and leaning out the window to wave at Kara as she passes by on one of her routine weekend sweeps. And, because Alex has her in an exceptionally sappy mood today, Maggie makes a run to the Polaroid store to print out some of the photos they already have together.
The security guard hanging around recognizes Maggie, but the look of confusion on his face along with the certain knowledge that by Monday, everyone in the precinct will know that Maggie Sawyer walked out of the mall grinning like an idiot at the photos in her hand, is worth it when Maggie sees the look on Alex’s face when she gets back with the photos and lengths of string and clips to hang them up on.
“Hey,” Alex says, when they’re on the couch watching a movie after dinner. Maggie’s pretty cocooned in Alex’s arms and a blanket and ready to fall asleep on Alex’s chest, but glances up anyways to find Alex opening her camera. Maggie smiles, reaching up to kiss Alex’s cheek and smile for the camera, and settles back down onto the couch and drowsiness and her overwhelming happiness as she watches Alex change her home screen from the picture of them making jokes in the DEO training room to this selfie, the image of two girls curled up on a ratty old couch in Maggie’s apartment, smiling like nothing in the world matters more to each of them than the other.
“That’s a good one,” Maggie mumbles, burrowing back into Alex’s chest. “Might have to send it to Kara.”
Maggie feels Alex chuckle under her cheek, feels the kiss dropped to the top of her head.
“Nah,” Alex says, shifting as she sets her phone down and pulls Maggie in closer.
“That one’s just for us.”
And Maggie, remembering the unguarded smiles on their faces and the happiness in their eyes, thinks before she falls asleep, that Alex is right, and some memories may be best treasured between them.
… and knowing Kara, she’ll probably end up seeing it and freaking out over them sooner rather than later.