Chapter Text
An hourglass is a paradox. It holds an exact amount of sand, and therefore a finite amount of time, and yet it can go on forever and ever with a simple reset.
What does it mean to have a limited amount of time and have forever all at once?
It’s a question she has struggled to be able to answer, even with something as paramount as this.
She has never had an issue with presentations. Not in front of her sniggering peers in high school, nor in front of her college competition, nor in front of prestigious military superiors.
She has never let her voice tremble even as it carried around an entire auditorium. Never let her hands shake as she clutched at her guiding notes.
But now, her heart vulnerable, she falters.
Alex scans the expressions in front of her for any disapproval, trying to gauge their reactions. Behind them through the glass, the DEO is a hive of activity, giving her lab an amniotic stillness.
“What do you think?” she finally asks.
Kara unfolds her arms, twisting at the thumb-grips of her suit in that girlish way she does. She smiles, broad and genuine. “Beautiful, Alex. Really beautiful.”
“Truly,” J’onn agrees, but his brow is furrowed.
Anxious and insecure after reading the draft of her wedding vows and pouring out her love into the room, Alex drops her shoulders. She chucks her notes to her bench, circling away to put it between them as she asks, “But there’s something wrong, isn’t there?”
Kara looks at J’onn, who scratches his chin.
“I sense it’s missing something,” he says.
“I knew it!” Alex hisses, “I just…I really want to express…” Growing frustrated at the mental block, she lifts a chemical spatula as if to continue the experiment she was conducting before they arrived, but uses it to tap the pages instead.
“I want to tell Maggie that this has felt inevitable, that even before I came out, I knew she was going to be special for me. That even just as friends, we would spend our lives together.” She twists at the lip of a beaker, looking around her at the tubs of white powder and processing which to begin with. But then she gives up, letting the spatula clink against the empty glass. “I just- I don’t know how.”
“You want to tell her you’re soulmates?” Kara suggests.
Alex shrugs, slumping her elbows against the lab table, defeat heavy on her frame. The simple hourglass she uses more as an ornament than a scientific instrument sits as a mock before her. “I can’t make it come out in a way that isn’t corny.”
“Sometimes, corny is good.” Kara bounces on her toes. “If there’s ever a day to be corny, it’s your wedding day.”
“I struggled to express the very same thing when I asked M'yri'ah to be my wife,” J’onn says. He reaches over, and tips the hourglass on its head, starting the countdown. The three of them watch the falling sand, imagining its hiss, the sound locked inside for none to hear.
He inspects the notes, the experiment, and then the lab as a whole. Then, he lumbers over to the entrance, leaving his words as a warning. “And you never know if you’ll ever get another chance to tell her, so may I suggest you don’t worry about hiding your heart.”
Alex sobers at the tone.
He’s right. Every day, their hourglass leaks sand. Yet every grain that has passed is precious, and every one still to come is valued.
If only she knew how to express it.
~
She begins to shed notes, leaving them all around the place, scribbling ideas when she can. Her office, her apartment, her locker; she’s even tempted to scratch some words into her napkin when she spots Maggie gliding through the crowd.
She’d booked this table because while it wasn’t the location of their first date, it was where they had gone for the one that mattered. The one that begin with full-bellied laughter over appetizers and ended with her finally experiencing what it meant to make love to a woman.
Maggie takes her seat, scooting close to the table, and then they lean together for a kiss.
“Hey,” she breathes, leaning back, getting settled, “Sorry I’m a little late.”
“Yeah, I was ready to start in on the table cloth.”
Her fiancée flashes that toothy grin, the one that humours Alex’s flat jokes. She may have been rushing from her shift in the precinct, but there’s a hint of freshly topped up perfume, a glimmer of recently applied makeup around her cheeks, glittering in the sunset.
She’s stunning, heart-stopping, Alex knows. And maybe, she frets, if she was smarter, she would be able to put a voice to that in her vows.
They order their starters and drinks, and then Maggie produces the folded sheet of seating arrangements for the wedding. The marks, crosses and wild arcing arrows all show there has already been several changes to the layout.
“We can’t have Sergeant Hanson beside McIntyre,” Maggie declares.
“Why? I thought they were good friends?”
“They were.” She fixes the edge of their tablecloth, and speaks as if she’s trying to hide the truth away underneath it. “Til McIntyre was found with Hanson’s wife, that was..”
Alex blinks. “When...when did that happen?”
“Last week. Led to a big bust up outside the station. Almost led to suspensions.”
Tapping at the list with her pen, Alex asks, “Should we even invite both of them? We don’t wanna have one of those weddings.”
“We can’t uninvite them now, Alex. And besides, they were both pretty good to me when I first came to National City.”
She purses her lips, staring down at the names. Hanson. McIntyre. She clicks the pen in, holds it. They were cops at a cop table, and now they would have to be separated into the sea of cousins, colleagues and aliens. She releases the pen’s top with a resounding clack .
Dammit.
They’re no further forward when they order their main. Alex tops up their wine with the bottle, studying the way they have pulled people out and slotted others in. Names revolve around the circular tables, some jumping across the room, some remaining where they were. She closes her eyes and tastes her wine and then lets herself return to the atmosphere of here and now.
The slight evening breeze lifts the ends of her hair and tickles at her cheeks flushed with wine and company. The Whiskey Ship has a whole section on a balcony overlooking the marina. In the sunset, she can see each freckle dotting her lover’s nose, see the furrow in her brow as she concentrates on their seating arrangements, and takes the time to savour how lucky she was to have found this woman, this love.
She looks out over the marina. Earlier in the day there was a raft race, and the laughter and chatter of families returning to the boardwalks and heading home drifts up to the balcony. Further down, she can see the sailboats bobbing in the section which is privately owned. With no big ships to spoil the view, she can see further still, out to the ocean.
Maggie sighs and refolds the sheet, shuffling it back into her jacket. She grins, placing her chin on her palm. “What are you thinking about?”
Alex mirrors her, grinning. “I’m very, very in love with you.”
“Okay, softie,” Maggie teases, but she reaches out to brush some hair from Alex’s temple.
Their rings are testament enough that she feels the same. She wants to ask if Maggie is also struggling with putting the depths of her emotions down on paper. Instead, she looks back to the coloured sails of the boats in the harbour. They look almost identical, to someone unfamiliar with the aquatic vehicles. She thinks of them all in a line, all the same, but sailing off into different directions, for different destinations.
After J’onn and Kara spoke with her, she thought about that theory of soulmates. She googled for a while, reading up on hypotheses of alternative universes, and from what she had experienced and heard about Kara’s adventures with Barry, she knew there were endless possibilities for what life could be like for her, or a version of her.
Were she and Maggie together in any of those other lives?
She waits until dessert, until she’s seeing Maggie’s glee at the notion of tiramisu, to bring it up. The inky night has begun to stain the sky and take the sailboats out of sight, but the lights of the marina give enough atmosphere for her to fall deeper into her fiancée's presence.
“Do you ever think about other universes?” she asks.
Maggie swallows a mouthful of wine and nods. “I wonder if we’re together.” She swirls her glass, the marina lights bringing out the twinkle in her eye. “I feel like we are.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Even if the world is completely different or maybe just slightly different, we’re together.”
Alex sits straighter in her chair, observing the other patrons. A woman wears a designer dress two tables away, her wrist, neck and handbag dripping with expense. “So, even if I’m secretly really rich, or maybe the colour of my hair is different?”
“Or you’re secretly a shop owner, or a dentist,” Maggie suggests, “Or a cop.”
“Or a florist. A nuclear physicist. A receptionist for L-Corp.”
“A baker.”
“A baker, Maggie? Really?”
They share a laugh, that same kind of full-throated laughter that takes Alex back to that date when nerves had swirled low in her stomach at the flash-fantasies of flesh on flesh, the anticipation of the possibilities. Now, she feels excitement at the thoughts of white cloth, of blooming spring flowers on a winter’s morning, of trembling voices and the smash of glass underfoot before a cheer.
Maggie softens, toying with her engagement ring. “Endgame is the same, Danvers. You and me.”
“I like that. I like thinking about that.”
“Me too.”
Later, after they’d gone home and made love, Alex lay in Maggie’s arms and wondered how many versions of her were experiencing this very treasure; which Maggie had dug up in her heart, and which she valued above all else.
~
The hourglass tips, up, round, down. Starting its spillage again.
Alex continues to shed notes, flips the hourglass, works, no solution in sight. She runs missions, eats, sleeps, fucks. But no amount of staring down into Maggie’s eyes as they make love makes the words flow any easier. The wedding steps a day closer, and another, and another. Her gathering nest of notes has no clear thread, no clarity, and no heart.
It’s only when she and J’onn are doing inventory that she breaks out of the funk. On a dusty shelf, squeezed between two galactical braces, are the headsets they used when Kara was under the influence of the Black Mercy. She reaches out and picks up the gear.
She remembers the blue lights of the active headset, pulling her into the vivid world of Krypton. She remembers how Winn used to fall over himself regarding Lord Technologies.
After the inventory check, she signs out the headset and brings it to his desk with a proposition.
“Plain sailing,” he says, his sarcasm bouncing down into the headset as he brings it closer to examine.
A fitting phrase , she thinks, remembering those boats on the marina, their potential to set course for any destination.
It takes them four slow work days and six interspaced productive days before they are able to wrangle the headsets into the shape they need to be in. On day one, it didn’t even seem possible, but Winn was never going to back down from a challenge involving technology.
She recounts her encounter with the Black Mercy, the experience she had under the spell cast by the technology. They modulate, adjust, modify and enhance, until on the tenth and final day of the process, Winn sits ramrod straight in his chair, gaping at the test run.
“Complete success!” He takes it off with a triumphant cheer, jangling it high above his head. “In another world, I’m a land auctioneer”
“Of all things, ” Alex teases, confiscating the headset before he drops it. But his excitement is earned. She’s proud of him, in awe that they could achieve what had been a far off fantasy.
Now, she paces Room 113, a space used for agents and distressed aliens. It has specifically designed ambience transmitters and mood generators so they can come to cool off or calm down. There are a variety of soft surfaces for them to meditate on, as well as systems to induce vibration, white noise, or even music into the air.
“They’ll work the same,” Winn assures for the third time, hopping between the original headset and a second which he has built and engineered.
“And they’re linked?” Alex asks.
“Yes. For the last time, they’re linked. But if you two aren’t linked, there’s nothing I can do about that.” He throws up his hands, then freezes at her raised eyebrow. “I didn’t mean linked like linked , like innuendo linked, I just meant in gen- yeah, I’ll shut up now.”
She smirks, but her anxiety fails to abate. “And there’s an emergency disconnect?”
“Yup. Just like last time, except this time it will pick up distressed brain waves.” He stands, brushing off his knees and fishing the key to the room out of his pockets. “All yours.”
Alex looks at the key dangling in the air. “How distressed?”
“Risk of death, distressed. Not, like, angry or fighting distressed.” He shakes the key impatiently.
“Okay.” She takes it, lets the bite of the metal teeth ground her. “Okay.”
Winn’s tablet bleets from the ground, and he scoops it up. It’s a live map of the building, with agent numbers roaming around. He can see everyone in the building, either through a tracker or through the chip in their visitor’s pass. There are government officials inspecting the weaponry, and Maggie entering through the underground entrance.
“Here she is,” he says cheerfully, “It’s showtime, Danvers.”
He strides out of the room, waving over his shoulder as he cradles his tablet. “Good luck, I’ll send her in here.”
The mere single minute it takes for Maggie to reach Room 113 is sheer agony. Alex shakes her hourglass like a snow globe, the rustic sand sifting and dispersing with the force. She brought it in as a lucky talisman, but now she fears it’s a bad omen.
As the sand settles, she seeks the calm trapped within the curved glass, but she can’t achieve it. She just waits, nerves sparking in her stomach.
Eventually, Maggie pokes her head in the door. “Hey. They told me you were in here.”
“Hey. Shoes!”
Seeing Alex’s boots neatly placed by the entrance, Maggie slips her own off, and steps out onto the padded floor. She curls her toes experimentally, bouncing her heels against it, and then snorts.
“Why do you make us have sex in your windowless office when this place exists?” she mumbles, glancing over to make sure the door swung shut behind her.
Alex ignores her question. “Remember when we talked about other versions of us?”
Her fiancée tilts her head, adjusts the badge on her hip and then folds down into a seated position. She gets comfortable, her palms on her knees, back straight, before she replies. “Yeah?”
“Well, what if there was a way to see inside their worlds?”
“What?”
Jittering with that nervous energy, Alex rushes to lock them in, and then rushes back. She jerkily drops onto the cushioned floor and gestures to the headsets. Maggie eyes them as if they might jump up at any second. Persisting, she pushes a set towards the other woman and taps at the top of it.
“This latches on to our...essence,” she explains, “It finds it in other worlds through different vibrational speeds, and lets us experience a virtual reality, dream-like sequence of what they’re experiencing.”
Maggie picks up a headset, testing its weight in her hands, turning it over and pulling lightly at the headstrap. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope. This was used to penetrate the Black Mercy’s hold on Kara. Now, we can use semi-portal technology to steal a pinch of another world and have it play out right here.”
Maggie scrutinizes the headset as she would evidence at a crime scene. Winn’s craftsmanship exceeds the decent standard Alex had asked for. The wires wind like vines around the frame, neatly tacked to the body of the headset. She also suspects he polished the lenses on the eye-gear.
“What are the risks?” Maggie asks, pressing her thumbs into the squishy leather-like plastic of the ear-gear, “Cause there’s gotta be some huge ones, right?”
“It’s dangerous. Before, we could have been trapped in the cerebral field if our brainwaves rejected the interference,” Alex concedes, “But since we used it for Kara, Winn and I have minimised those risks. Now we have emergency disconnect to bring us out of it no matter what happens in there.”
Sceptical and hesitating, Maggie raises her eyebrows. “You’re sure about this?”
“Don’t do it if you don’t want to.” Alex reaches out for the headset, but Maggie immediately retracts it, holding it close to her chest like a toy Alex wanted to steal from her.
“No I-” They share a grin at the childish reaction. Maggie relaxes her hold, letting the headset rest in her lap.“I want to see, I mean I know you have crazy tech in this place. And I trust you.”
“Trust that we have emergency disconnect, too. If it gets too dangerous, or scary, we’re out.”
“I do.”
Those two words smother the atmosphere in the room. They can hear the rumbles and mumbles of the busy DEO above, below, around Room 113. But they also hear those two words, out of context, trembling like the final note of a song.
It’s Alex who clears her throat and shuffles towards a sheepish Maggie until their knees bump. She pushes Maggie’s hair behind her ears and reaches for the headset, settling the frame down over her head. She shuffles the headphones down and tightens at the strap, tilting her lover’s chin this way and that to check the mobility.
“Comfortable?” Maggie nods. “Not too tight?” She shakes her head. “Good.”
Alex leaves the eye-gear up, clicking on the side until the frame’s blue lights come to life. Then she shifts backwards towards the Conductor, a tablet-like device which will link the headsets into the same vibrational pattern for the Earth.
“I hope we’re not doing anything dangerous,” Maggie says, spreading her hands out behind her and leaning back.
“We might not even be together,” Alex says, not looking up from the Conductor.
“What?”
Alex does look up at the tone of surprise. “You’ll see you, and I’ll see me. We might not even know each other there.”
The Conductor pings, and she sees their icons coming up onscreen.
Maggie cranes her neck. “You’ve matched these sets to our genetic profiles in the DEO database?”
“Very good,” Alex says, setting the Conductor aside and lifting her own headset on, “Guess I’m not the only science nerd in the room, huh?”
“Shut up.”
She fixes it around her ears and loosens the strap around the back of her skull. Then she rifles around the menus and settings of the Conductor, scanning for any irregularities and running a final systems check.
“Pull the eye-gear down,” she instructs, pointing at Maggie’s headset. “Ready?”
Despite having never used this kind of technology before, Maggie pulls her eye-gear down right away and sits up straighter. “Ready when you are.”
Alex sets the Conductor down alongside the hourglass, which has already gone back to stillness. With a smile, she tips it up and starts the run of sand again. Then she presses the initiator on the Conductor, and gets her ten second countdown.
“Let’s hope you’re right,” Alex says, shoving down her own eye-gear, “And we aren’t doing anything danger-”
~
Her thigh cramps from pressing down on the accelerator too hard. An engine pushed to its limit growls ferociously. The wheels squeal as she pulls off impossibly tight turns.
The heavy sway of the vehicle as she tests the extent of its abilities should make her more nervous as they zip through the thoroughfare.
Streets and vehicles blur into a multicoloured spectrum on either side of her, the only focus being her goal.
A crackle goes up on the dash. “Come in, 208.”
Her partner, J’onn, picks up the call. “208 here, receiving.”
“How far out, 208?”
Alex jumps in. “ETA 2 minutes.”
“4 minutes,” J’onn corrects.
“2 minutes,” she confirms, pushing the bus harder down through the streets and blaring the horn at a cyclist who jerks to the right.
“Uh, I’ll take that as 2 minutes ETA.”
“Thank you, Winn,” J’onn says pointedly, staring at his partner, “We’ll try to arrive in one piece.”
Despite the adrenaline of a big job, Alex grins. As paramedics, they had been through the trenches together, J’onn being her guide, mentor, friend and rock. Fresh-faced and bandy-legged from her training, she hadn’t expected the horrors that working for the National City emergency services could bring.
True to her word, Alex brings the ambulance to a screeching stop just over 2 minutes later. Blue lights flash from every direction, and she looks past them to focus on the grey mound in front of them.
“Goddamn,” J’onn marvels and then jumps out.
Alex hops out after, slamming the door shut. She grabs a bag from the back, slings it over her shoulder, and heads for the fray. She’s only stopped by a navy body pacing up beside her.
“Hey,” she greets.
(She takes pride in the fact her heartbeat only skips once, instead of the flutter it usually performs when she sees Sawyer on a scene like this.)
“Hey,” Maggie returns, heading in the same direction. “Glad you could join us.”
They duck under the perimeter tape, where bystanders gawk for a better view of the chaos, even as uniformed rookies advise them to stay back. Alex shakes a pair of gloves out of her uniform pocket, stretching them on , “What’ve we got?”
“Building collapse, boiler blew. Up to thirty people trapped.”
They stop several metres from the start of the debris, Alex straining this way and that on her tiptoes to see her first point of contact. She gives up and looks to her friend to guide her. They were old hands at scenes like this, Maggie being an experienced incident commander. “Okay. Anyone you’ve identified needing immediate attention?”
“Couple of crews here already,” Maggie says, gesturing around, “Think you and your sister could come with me? All these people are still trapped under some rubble. Got caught when they were escaping. Could be some seriously urgent cases.”
“Kara’s here?” Alex says, turning to see the firetruck, and heading that way. She glances at Maggie, who follows.
As a firefighter, it is inevitable that Kara would be working this scene. Yet Alex never gets used to the anxiety of having her younger sister working potentially perilous scenes such as these.
Kara is kneeling in front of her specialist colleague, helping on their booties.
“Good girl, Gertrude,” she cooes, stroking the retriever’s long coat, “You’re gonna do a lot of good work today, yes you are.”
She stands, beams at her sister, and then adjusts Gertrude’s harness. With one final pat to the head, she gives her sister and the officer her full attention.
“Ready?”
“Yup.”
Maggie stops several times to command her colleagues, or advise them on how the situation was progressing. Together they stride towards the crook of the building where machinery and equipment are already being put in place.
Gertrude leaps up, sniffing at an opening in the fractured concrete, her front paws dancing as she whines, and then barks.
“Good girl,” Kara praises, climbing up onto the perch. She pokes her torch into the gap. “Hello?”
“Hello?” comes a hoarse, quiet reply.
“Hi there. I’m Kara, and this is Officer Sawyer and my sister.” She peers in closer, speaking to someone buried under the mound of broken building. “She’s a paramedic. She’s gonna ask a couple questions, okay?”
“Okay,” is the shaky response.
Kara nods, signing off to them, and then clicks her teeth, coaxing Gertrude upwards for another search. Alex clambers up into her place, setting down her bag and peeking into the opening.
“Hi there,” she says cheerily, pulling her bag in front of her and unzipping it, “How you doing?”
Trapped in the rumble is a girl no older than seven, caked in grey dust. “Where’s my mom?” she asks.
Alex hums, “I know you really wanna talk to your mom, but we’re gonna have to concentrate on you first, okay?” She clicks on her torch and peeks down into the space in the chunks of concrete. “Are you hurt anywhere?
The girl nods, filthy and afraid in her enclave. Alex can see she has a bloody, smeared trail from her hairline to her cheek, and while it seems superficial, she knows any head injury is worrying.
It’s an operation, but they get her out. As the machines lift away the debris to free her, Alex darts about where J’onn, Kara or Maggie shout for her to go. She helps set a broken leg for transport, holds a man’s head still as they work on a possible spine injury, and comforts a woman traumatised by it all.
Eventually Maggie jerks her head and they return to the girl, who hasn’t managed to get transported to the hospital yet. Alex gently cleans her forehead, noticing how she twitches and winces but refuses to cry.
“You’re being so brave,” she remarks. “You’re the bravest girl I’ve ever met.”
“Even braver than the police woman?” the girl asks, her green eyes glinting with humour.
Alex cranes over her shoulder to see Maggie consulting with a news crew, and that now familiar stir begins in her stomach-
They’d met on a one-two. The first incident was pure pressure, the kind only present on bad days or training days. It involved a factory fire, chemicals in play, civilians swarming onto scene from surrounding housing. By the time Alex and J’onn had arrived, the NCPD and NCFD were already trying to set up emergency triage spots.
When all was said and done with transporting patients to hospital, Alex used her lunch break to go to Station 12 and check on her sister. She had seen Kara carry no less than three unconscious people out from the roaring flames, and while she knew Kara was simply performing her job, it was her instinct to do a final check.
Hopping from her firetruck, Kara took off her helmet and wiped at the soot around her hairline. “Who was that new girl? She was way more on the ball than the previous guy who did fire scenes with us.”
Alex thought of the incident commander barking orders over the deafening noise of a dozen people trying to fight a blaze. “No idea.”
The second of the one-two was four hours later, near the end of her shift. Alex and J’onn were called to something relatively harmless. A kid had been knocked off their bike in a low-speed accident which occurred in a residential area. Still, the NCPD were the first responders, and Alex saw that woman again, treating the kid with such compassion as she checked out the motions of their arm.
And for months, they’ve been dancing, but while their incidents align, their shift patterns never do. They text, they exchange banter, but they can never manage to spend time together outside their rotas.
Finally, in the back of the ambulance last week after a particularly harrowing case, they’d shared a kiss, one that left Alex gasping for more. But the radio sounded, and she had to go.
They’d talked about it since, over text, but they hadn’t really gotten round to talking in person.
Maggie catches her eye, and for a second all the dust, the rubble, the chaos is quiet. And then the officer starts over, and Alex turns back to the girl with a wink.
“Oh, you’re way braver than the police woman.”
“A second crew is picking up her mom,” Maggie says, crouching down to the girl’s height. “Do you wanna go with her?”
The girl nods, and Maggie smiles, holding out her hand. Alex sits back on her heels, watching her lead the girl to another waiting ambulance.
At the end of it all, two and a half hours after they had arrived on site, Alex stands surveying the scene. She takes it all in, the diggers, the fluttering perimeter tape, her sister coaxing a tired Gertrude back into the firetruck.
Maggie appears at her elbow again, whistling at the collapsed building. “That’s gonna cost the city a pretty penny.”
But Alex doesn’t want to talk about taxes or infrastructure, she wants to grasp the quiet seconds while she still can. She whirls around, catching Maggie by surprise. “Listen, are you off or on duty this Saturday?”
Maggie blinks. “You need another delivery of stale coffee to the ambulance dock?”
“Actually, I was wondering -”
“Alex.” She spins to see J’onn half-in the bus. “We have another call. Multiple car collision on Blossom Avenue.”
She drops her shoulders. Another chance, lost in the madness of their jobs. But fingertips reach out and lift her chin, brown eyes shimmering with understanding.
“Be careful out there,” Maggie says, “We’ll get time.”
The cruiser is parked beside her ambulance, and Alex lingers as Maggie opens the door. The radio is going, dispatch trying to get in touch with her. She hears Blossom Avenue , through the crackle, her ears pricking up.
“You coming to the next one?” she asks.
“Ride or die,” Maggie answers, ducking back into her cruiser.
Every job is different. She jumps back into the ambulance and shuts the door as J’onn puts his foot down on the pedal. She watches the rubble whizzle away to a grey spec in her wing mirror and wonders what kind of day it’s gonna be -