Work Text:
i'm at your back door
with the earth of a hundred nations in my skin
you won't recognize me
for the light in my eyes is strange
one
then your heart beats on this sad song
underground, underneath me
and the big things we could’ve had
Eighteen months, two weeks, and four days have passed since Lucy Lane saw any of the people she’d considered family once upon a time. Eighteen months, two weeks, and four days, and Alex Danvers walks into her office in DC and closes the door with a quiet click.
She doesn’t speak for long seconds, staring at Lucy as Lucy stares at the glove covering Alex's right hand.
Prosthetic. It’s not her real hand anymore. It hasn’t been for eighteen months, two weeks, and six days. It’s teflon and circuits, millions of dollars of L Corp research and development and all of Alex’s bioengineering capabilities crammed into one dextrous, functional, feeling prosthetic that still would never be a real hand.
“This is where you’ve been hiding?”
Lucy doesn’t say anything, grinding her teeth together and gripping her pen tighter and turning her focus back down to the paperwork in front of her.
There’s a scrape as Alex pulls the chair opposite her out and sits down into it, leaning forward with her elbows on the desk. Lucy clenches her jaw tighter to keep from looking up.
Alex’s gloved hand appears in her eyeline, and Lucy balks, jerking back into her chair as Alex yanks the pen from her fingers.
“What are you--”
“You left ,” Alex says sharply. “No one’s seen you since the funeral, we--”
“Stop it,” Lucy grinds out. She takes a deep breath, slow and measured, and then another, and another, until her heart rate calms minutely and her fingers unclench from the fists they’d formed automatically. “Why are you here?”
“Because you left,” Alex says. She rubs at her eyes and slumps back in the chair. She’s not in her DEO uniform; the black glove would have looked barely out of place against the dark materials of her uniform but stands in stark contrast to the muted green of her button down and the blue of her jeans. “Kara was-- we were worried. We thought you just needed some time, but then you just never came back. The general stonewalled us. Kara talked to Clark, who talked to Lois, who said you were here.”
She pauses, craning her neck around to take in the rest of the small office. The walls are covered in bookshelves, stuffed to bursting with binders and law books. “What are you even doing here?”
“My job,” Lucy says, aiming for short and sharp but landing somewhere in the vicinity of soft and sad instead.
“Which is what, exactly? Filing paperwork for the general forever?”
“It’s an important job.”
“It’s bullshit,” Alex says, sitting up straighter in her chair. “You’re one of the best commanders I’ve ever seen and you’re hiding in a back office in DC filing requisitions?”
“It’s an important job,” Lucy says again. “Go away, Alex.”
Alex reaches for Lucy, hesitant and uncertain and searching for a familiarity that had started to build between them eighteen months and three weeks ago, when they’d been on two dates and were standing on the edge of something new and hopeful and real. Before Alex lost her hand, before Kara nearly died, before the operation Lucy had been quarterbacking from DEO headquarters had left Alex crippled and James and Winn and Mon-El all dead. Before she walked away from the funerals and the honor guards and the dedication of a memorial in their honor and never came back, leaving behind a collection of shattered pieces that had been the family she made once upon a time.
“You need to come home,” Alex says. She pulls her hands back and folds her arms over her stomach. “The DEO is back on its feet, and J’onn and I need you to--”
“No,” Lucy says evenly. “I’m done with tactical work. I don’t do that anymore.”
“So that’s it, then?” Alex snaps. “You get to give up while the rest of us keep trying?”
“It’s not giving up,” Lucy throws back. “It’s removing myself from command. I got half of my team killed, Alex. Kara nearly died. J’onn nearly died. You nearly died and you lost your right hand. That’s on me, no one else, and I’m not going to get anyone else killed when all I’m doing is filing requisitions, so no , I’m not coming back.”
“Lucy,” Alex says quietly. She has that look on her face, the same one that Lucy could never say no to, the one that lays bare all the sadness buried under the doctorates and combat training. “Nobody blames you for what happened. We all came up with the attack plan together, we all knew what we were getting into. It’s not your fault.”
“It’s my fault I wasn’t there. It’s my fault it was them and not me.”
“You’re one person,” Alex says. “One. Singular. You’re not God. You couldn’t have stopped it from happening even if you were there on the ground.”
“I should have--”
“What?” Alex says, tired and worn and so, so sad. “Died alongside them?”
Lucy’s teeth grind together. “I’m not going back,” she says again. She nods towards the door. “You know the way out.”
Alex sighs, staring down at her prosthetic hand, fingers flexing and relaxing slowly. “I don’t blame you for this,” she says softly, tugging the glove off and settling her prosthetic hand on the desk. “And I don’t blame you for them dying. They were family, all of them, and I miss them every day. But I don’t blame you. We all knew what the risks were, and we took them on our own. My hand, James, Winn, Mon-El-- none of it is your fault. I don’t blame you.”
Lucy licks at her lips, unable to look away from the metal and circuits that comprise Alex’s new hand.
“And I miss you,” Alex says, even more softly. She leans forward again, reaching with her hand-- her real hand, the one that’s still made of flesh and blood and bone, callouses and scars and nerves -- for Lucy. Lucy leans back further, pulling her hands down into her lap.
“There’s nothing to miss,” Lucy says quietly. She jerks her head towards the door once more. “I have a lot of work to get done. Please leave.”
Alex stands, finally, slowly. She works the glove back over her hand and curls the fingers into a fist. The movement throws a soft whirring noise into the silence, and Lucy flinches.
“I’m here for a week,” Alex says, not looking away from her gloved hand. “Figured that while I was looking for you I would meet with Senator Crane and her people.” She picks up a pad of sticky notes from Lucy’s desk and scribbles a hotel address and room number on it. She writes with her left hand now, the handwriting slanted and unfamiliar.
“You know,” Alex says, hand on the doorknob and not looking over her shoulder to Lucy. Lucy stares at her back, the familiar line of her spine and shoulders, the way her hair shifts when she shakes her head, the curves of muscle working subtly under her shirt. “There’s nothing you need to be forgiven for, but you have been. By me, and Kara, and J’onn, and James’ mother, and the entire DEO. Everyone just wants you to come home.”
Lucy closes her eyes, presses her lips together, breathes. She doesn't open her eyes until the door clicks open and then shut again; she blinks to an empty office and crumples, forehead falling into her hands and breath coming raggedly.
This is home now.
two
choke down the gateway drug
opened the gates, in came the flood, it comes
like a blush of love, it hits me without warning
long nights of getting lost
i walk beneath the bridge i don't know
i need black suit for tomorrow, i'm in mourning
Alex’s hotel is two blocks from the national mall. The lobby is cavernous and gilded, sound escaping upwards in a muffled rumble. Lucy paces around the lobby for ten minutes, the scuff of each step of her boots disappearing into the open lobby, before losing half of her nerve and disappearing instead into the bar.
She orders a glass of wine to start, and then shifts to beer, to bourbon, to scotch. She settles eventually on vodka, her least favorite liquor; it bites and burns in a manner that suits her mental state.
Three vodkas and seven drinks total in, and everything blurs a little around the edges. Once, she had been a lightweight, tipping into drunk after two drinks; now it takes six to push past the three closed caskets lowered into the ground in National City under the morning sun and a fresh marble memorial. It’s dark out, sunlight faded into the glare of streetlamps and headlights glinting through the windows. She glances at her watch-- it’s nearly ten-- and hiccups quietly, digs the sticky note with Alex’s new slanted left-handed writing on it out of her purse. It’s a bad idea, going to Alex when she’s this drunk. She’s liable to say things she shouldn’t, do more things she can’t live with.
Lucy pays her tab and heads to the elevators anyways. Alex is on the eighth floor, and the glide of the elevator nauseates her on the way up. She half shuffles, half stumbles along, the heels of her boots scraping along the carpeted hallway, until she finds Alex’s room and knocks before her brain can tell the vodka to turn around.
The door opens to Alex, in sweatpants and a t-shirt and glasses, blinking at Lucy slowly. Lucy swallows the nausea building in her throat and wishes, desperately, for the first time in eighteen months, that she was sober. She doesn’t speak, tongue heavy in her mouth and vodka weighing heavily against her sternum, and instead shuffles forward and leans up on her toes, clumsy and drunk and useless, to kiss Alex.
Before-- before their friends were killed, before Alex’s hand was crushed, before Lucy had stood in the DEO command center watching and listening as Alex’s arm was caught under the falling concrete column she’d tried to push James out of the way of, before Kara was stabbed with a kryptonite blade and Winn’s truck was blasted with an RPG and Mon-El was perforated with lead bullets-- they had gone on two dates. One dinner at a quiet restaurant on the water, one set of drinks at a bar that lead to hand-holding as Alex walked Lucy home. They had shared one kiss on the street corner outside Lucy’s apartment, barely tipsy and full of uncertainty and promise and something soft and warm like hope.
This is not that. Lucy is too drunk and Alex too surprised, and teeth clack against each other and lips slide sloppily and miss their target, Lucy’s hands fumbling for purchase in the material of Alex’s shirt, Alex dropping the file of paperwork she’d been holding. Lucy stumbles, falling into the hotel room, and Alex barely catches her, the movement dislodging her glasses until they nearly fall off her face. The skin of her left hand is warm, normal; the metal of her right cold and artificial, and Lucy flinches, jerks away, falls into the wall.
“Lucy,” Alex says, tight and pained. She rights her glasses and shuts the door. “What are you--”
“I don’t sleep anymore,” Lucy mumbles out. She leans further into the wall, tipping her head back until her skull thinks against the plaster, and slides down until she’s sitting on the floor. Alex crouches down at her side, reaching like always and pulling back still. Lucy’s head lolls over to the side and she smiles, thin and sloppy and full of self-deprecation. “One year, six months, two weeks, five days. I sleep less now than I did in Afghanistan.”
Alex settles down to sit across from her, knees pulled up to her chest to mirror Lucy’s position. The foyer of the hotel room is narrow and there’s not room for them both, and Alex’s bare toes sit to the side of Lucy’s boots.
“I still have nightmares about it,” Alex says after a moment. She props her chin on her knees. “Not as much as I used to, but-- still.”
“I saw all of it,” Lucy says. Her words slur together and her chin drops to her chest, her body too intoxicated and head too heavy to sit upright. “On the satellites. I saw Kara get stabbed, I saw Mon-El die. I saw the RPG blow Winn up, and the walls start to collapse. I saw you try to--” She cuts herself off, inhaling so sharply it makes her cough. Alex’s hands clench around her shins, jaw tight and shoulders pushing back into the wall to keep herself from moving.
“I saw James die. I sent him in there, I sent Winn in there-- I knew they weren’t going to be safe. They were good, but not that good. I sent them in there to die.”
“You didn’t send anyone,” Alex says. “We made a tactical decision, as a team, to go in. All of us.”
“Everyone except me,” Lucy says into her chest. “I stayed nice and safe and watched my friends die. I have more combat training than Winn and James and Mon-El did combined, but I was the one who stayed behind.”
“We all would have died if you hadn’t,” Alex says sharply. “The rest of us only got out of there because of you. We needed someone to quarterback and yeah, we lost people, we lost family , but if you hadn’t been there to call the shots and find a way in for the backup teams all of us would have been buried with them.” She reaches for Lucy again, fingers skimming along Lucy’s knee gently. “You saved our lives. You saved me, and Kara, and J’onn. We’re alive because of you.”
“Some life,” Lucy mutters, staring pointedly at Alex’s prosthetic hand.
“Hey,” Alex says. Angers brushes against her cheeks, a warm red flush. “I’m not broken . I’m still here and alive and healthy. Don’t treat me like I’m going to break into a hundred pieces just because of this. ” She thrusts her prosthetic hand between them.
Nausea rises in a wave from Lucy’s stomach, and she scrambles to her feet, stumbling into the bathroom to throw up into the toilet. The tile is hard under her knees, cold and sharp through the material of her jeans. Vodka and whiskey and wine burn her throat on the way back up.
A hand settles on her back, rubbing gently up and down, waiting patiently until she’s thrown up everything she drank and then some. Alex kneels at her side, pulls her hair back into a ponytail, stays with her on the bathroom floor until Lucy finally collapses, dropping from numb knees to her side on the floor. Alex catches her and holds her, guiding Lucy’s head down to rest in her lap and Lucy, spent and dehydrated and broken, cries into the material of Alex’s sweatpants until she falls asleep.
three
heaven knows that i put you through hell
but in a sense you'll have to forgive me
the spirit cries like a ghost in a shell
reaches out not for pleasure but pity
Lucy wakes up in a bed. Her body resists, muscles sore enough and neck stiff enough that she must have slept most of the night on the bathroom floor. Her boots sit by the bathroom door, settled neatly and parallel to Alex’s shoes. In the corner of her eyeline, the nightstand holds her phone and purse and watch and earrings, all stacked next to a bottle of Gatorade.
She rolls over, rubbing at her eyes. The curtains to the sliding door that leads to the balcony are pulled back. Alex stands on the balcony in a suit, phone pressed to her ear. The door is half open, and Alex’s voice floats into the room, hushed and quiet.
“--still asleep,” Alex says. “She didn’t even wake up when I left this morning. I don’t think she’s slept much at all in months.” She goes quiet, head tilting back as she listens, and Lucy curls up under the blankets on her side, blinking sleepily as she watches. “She’s-- I don’t know, Kara. She blames herself for everything-- no, I know, I told her that, she just-- doesn’t believe me.
Lucy pulls the blanket tighter over her shoulders, disappearing further into the bed.
“I’m going to try, you know I am,” Alex goes on from the balcony. “I want her to come home as much as you do, you know that… I’ll let you know, okay? I can’t promise anything.” She pushes a hand through her hair, grimacing when it pulls on her blazer, and unbuttons it disdainfully. “I love you,” she says as she hangs up and turns back to the room.
“You’re awake,” Alex says as she steps inside. She shrugs out of her jacket and drops it over the back of the chair. Hesitation pulls at her movements before she settles down on the bed, sitting at Lucy’s side. “How are you feeling?”
“I don’t think I’ve had a hangover like this since high school,” Lucy mumbles. Alex laughs, quiet and sad, and her hand reaches for Lucy’s cheek for a brief moment before redirecting to the bedside table and the Gatorade bottle.
“Here.” She offers the opened bottle to Lucy with one hand, the other reaching out to help Lucy sit up. Lucy is hungover enough to not notice, until it’s too late, that she’s gripping Alex’s prosthetic hand to pull herself up; her breath catches in her throat and her hand spasms, dropping Alex’s like it burned her.
“Sorry,” Lucy mumbles. She busies herself with drinking from the Gatorade bottle, chugging half of it in one go. She can’t tell if Alex was lucky in guessing the only flavor of Gatorade she liked, or if they’d talked about it at some point.
“Kara told me to tell you that she misses you,” Alex says. She smiles, barely. “And that she wishes you would come home.”
Lucy picks at the Gatorade label, squinting against her hangover. Words form and disappear in her chest, protests and excuses and explanations as to why she has to stay away, why she can’t go back, why she can’t look anyone in the eye again. Instead, all that comes out is “Can I shower?”
“Yeah,” Alex says with a sigh. “Of course.” She stands and offers her left hand to Lucy, prosthetic hanging at her side. Lucy stares for a long second before taking her hand, allowing Alex to help her to her feet. Her head aches with the movement and her body protests, as much from the constricting material of the jeans and sweater she’d slept in as from the soreness in her muscles.
“Thank you,” Lucy says, pulling her hand free as soon as she’s on her feet. She shuffles around the bed to the bathroom and shuts the door securely behind her, leans back against it tiredly once it’s closed. On the other side, Alex stands by the door; Lucy listens as there’s a soft, almost silent, thunk that can only be Alex leaning her forehead against the door.
Lucy waits, breathing slowly, until she’s sure Alex has moved away from the door, before she finally pulls her clothes off and steps into the shower. She reaches back out and claims the hotel-issue toothbrush on the counter, dropping the packaging in the garbage and brushing until her gums bleed and her mouth no longer tastes of vodka-tinged cotton.
She stays in the shower long past the point where her fingers and toes have wrinkled and the hot water has cleared away most of her hangover. The bathroom is a steamy mess when she shuts the water off, and she fumbles for a towel to wrap around herself. Her Gatorade has gone lukewarm, but she palms the bottle and takes a long sip anyways before opening the door. Steam spills out into the hotel room and cold air hits her wet skin, making her shiver.
Alex is sitting at the desk, laptop open and surrounded by paperwork. She pauses in her typing and turns to face Lucy, who’s standing uncertainly in the bathroom doorway.
“Hey,” Alex says quietly.
“Hi.” Lucy pulls the towel tighter around herself and steps uncertainly into the room, sitting on the edge of the bed furthest from Alex.
“How are you feeling?”
“Okay I guess,” Lucy says with a shrug. Alex reaches for her suitcase and digs a hairbrush out, offering it to Lucy, who doesn’t move to take it and just pulls at the edges of the Gatorade label. Alex takes a deep breath and moves to sit behind Lucy, hairbrush in hand.
“May I?”
Lucy pauses, not moving, back too straight and shoulders too tight, before nodding briefly. Alex hums in some kind of agreement and sets to untangling Lucy’s hair. It’s longer than it has been in years, the ends ragged and continually hidden in the regulation bun that sits at the base of her skull. Alex’s hands are gentle, working the brush through the tangles, and the tension in Lucy’s spine starts to dissipate slowly.
Minutes slide by, Alex methodically working through the tangles in Lucy’s hair and Lucy melting under her touch, shivering when fingers brush against the damp skin of her shoulders. Alex murmurs an apology, pausing in her untangling, and Lucy finally turns to face her. Her hand is hovering near Lucy’s back and she has that look, the one where her mouth goes into a straight line and her eyes are wide because she’s lost in a moment she can’t navigate, the look that she’d had when she woke up in the hospital to an amputated hand and dead friends, because once upon a time Lucy had been all sinewy muscle and now she’s just frail .
Lucy reaches for her, forgetting about the towel and dropping the Gatorade, hands settling instead on Alex’s cheeks because this is Alex, who had bashfully asked her on a date like they were fifteen years old, who had carried all of them on her back, who had always kept them together. This is Alex, who had kissed Lucy on a street corner eighteen months and three weeks ago, who had held onto Lucy’s hips with two human hands and kissed her like something new and hopeful and real was waiting for the two of them together. This is Alex, so Lucy leans over and kisses her, hands and lips gentle and retiring, waiting for Alex to respond.
“Lucy,” Alex says softly. She doesn’t pull back, holding steady inches away from Lucy’s lips and the towel that’s falling away from her. “You’re--we shouldn’t--this is a bad idea, right now.”
Lucy reaches down and picks up Alex’s prosthetic hand, pulls the glove off carefully, tracing the joints with her fingertips.
“I’ve fucked 34 women with brown hair since-- since I left.” She stumbles, not because of her actions but because she left, because people died, because Alex lost half of her family and all of her hand. “It’s never helped. Can’t you just-- please. One time.”
“This won’t fix anything,” Alex says, even as her breath hitches when Lucy’s fingers slide along her prosthetic hand and over the joint where it melds into her human arm, an inch past her prosthetic wrist, false circuits melding into skin and bone and nerve that all shudder and shiver under Lucy’s touch.
“Please,” Lucy says, quiet and desperate and wanting. “I know you don’t owe me anything and I know it won’t fix me and I know I walked away and I don’t deserve it or you but please , Alex.”
It’s enough, somehow, and Alex gives in. She pulls her hand free from Lucy’s hold and pushes at her shoulders, pushing until she lays down and the towel drops away and Alex can lean over her and kiss her, soft and slow. Lucy’s fingernails press gently into the skin on Alex’s back, pulling her closer until Alex takes her wrists and pushes them into the mattress, hips pushing against Lucy’s and teeth biting down on the side of her neck.
say goodnight and i'll take you to church
do you remember the first time you kissed me?
it feels good right there where it hurts
take it slow, you can never resist me
four
let me uncover the silver in your dark hair, the weight of your bones
i want to witness the beauty of your repair, the shape you’ve grown
for you are made of nebulas and novas and night sky
you’re made of memories you bury or live by
The next time Lucy wakes, her hangover has faded with the midafternoon sunlight and she’s curled up at Alex’s side, not quite touching but close enough to feel her breathe. Alex is laying on her stomach, head pillowed on her arms, awake and regarding Lucy carefully with guarded eyes.
“We can’t do that again,” she says. The sheet has slipped down, exposing half of her back and the scratch marks and crescent moon indentations Lucy’s fingernails left around her spine and shoulderblades. There’s a pattern of bruises above Lucy’s elbow, narrow finger marks left from a bionic hand far stronger than a normal human one, and Alex’s human fingers shift to ghost over them. “I’m sorry. I haven’t-- I still forget, sometimes.”
“It’s okay,” Lucy says to the ceiling. She pushes up to sitting, her body aching under the bruises and the hangover and the exhaustion. She stands, stretching and ignoring Alex’s eyes, and sets to gathering her clothes.
“So that’s it?” Alex says, propping up on her elbows. The sheet drops further down towards her hips, and Lucy swallows the block forming in her throat. “You show up blasted at my hotel, crash in my bed, fuck me in the afternoon and then go back to ignoring everyone and filing requisitions?”
Her clothes are in a pile in the bathroom, right where she’d left them, and she fumbles with underwear and jeans and her bra, fingers stumbling over the clasp. She catches sight of her just-fucked hair and the bruises dotting her collarbone and arm in the mirror and grinds her teeth together.
“I have to go,” she mumbles, yanking her shirt over her head.
“You can’t run away forever, you know,” Alex says. She’s sitting up, the sheet pooling at her waist, and she’s the naked one to Lucy’s fully clothed self but somehow Lucy is the one flushing and clearing her throat and stumbling in search of her shoes. “This isn’t a life, Lucy, you’re just hiding.”
“Stop it,” Lucy says, struggling with the zipper on her boots. Until last night she hadn’t worn anything but military regulation heels or running shoes in over a year. The boots are looser around her calves than they used to be.
“Stop what?” Alex snaps. “Calling you out for the fact that you gave up and left? That you walked away while the rest of us were left to pick up the pieces?”
“Stop it,” Lucy says again. Her hands shake as she struggles with the zipper on the other boot.
“No,” Alex says. “I came looking for you because you matter to me, dammit, to all of us. We thought you would come home, that you would come back to us, but you just didn’t . You quit and we were all goddamned disasters and we couldn’t even help you or get help from you because you left.”
“Stop it!” Lucy shouts, giving up on the zipper and throwing the boot down. “Why should I have stayed? I left because I got James killed . James and Winn and Mon-El are all dead because I screwed up. Why should I have stuck around after that to get more people killed?”
“It’s not your fucking fault,” Alex yells right back at her. “James made a choice to put on that stupid lead suit. Winn made a choice to be his support. Mon-El made a choice to fight with us. Kara chose, I chose, we all chose this war because it’s the right goddamned thing to do. You chose when you hijacked a prison truck to save me and J’onn. Everyone makes their own choices and you’re not God, Lucy, you’re just human. You can’t save everyone. It’s not your job to save everyone.”
“It may not have been my job, but I’m still responsible.” Lucy’s hands shake even more, the ache in her head shifting from a hangover to a pulsing rage. “You write left handed now because I let you down, Alex. I had one job and that was to protect all of you in the field, and I failed .”
“Shit happens,” Alex says as she yanks her glove over her hand. “It happens and it’s not your fault and you’re hiding from nothing except for the people who care about you.”
“I can’t,” Lucy whispers. “How am I supposed to face people? How am I supposed to look Kara in the eye when I let her boyfriend and her best friend die?”
“Kara misses you,” Alex says, shoulders slumping. “God, Lucy, she misses you so much. You’re family. It was so hard on her, losing them, but losing you? That was harder. You mean as much to her as they ever did and you decided to just disappear.” She locates her sweatpants and yanks them on, t-shirt following, and pushes her hair out of her face.
“I can’t go back.” Lucy wraps her arms around herself, stepping further and further back from Alex until she bumps into the door to the balcony. “I can’t-- not after--”
“I miss you, too,” Alex says quietly. “I miss you as my friend but I also miss-- I don’t know, maybe it’s stupid, missing something that never really got off the ground, but I do. I miss what we could have been. I wanted that, I wanted you, and then you were gone.”
“Please don’t say that,” Lucy says, shaking her head. “That’s not fair.”
“It’s not fair that you left us alone and expect us to just be okay with it,” Alex counters. She rounds the foot of the bed but doesn’t come any closer, keeping out of arm’s reach and shoving her hands into the pockets of her sweatpants. “I’m not telling you to come home so that people can be angry at you, Lucy. I’m telling you to come home because you matter, and you’re family, and there are so many pieces missing from our family right now. It’s not your fault that James and Mon-El and Winn are gone, but it’s your fault that you’re gone. All any of us want is for you to just be home .”
She sits down on the bed tiredly, spine curving and shoulders falling. “If you don’t want to be around us anymore, that’s one thing. But if you’re staying away because you think we want you to, then that’s bullshit.”
Lucy slides down the door until she’s sitting on the floor, knees giving out slowly because she’s so tired of being alone and falling under the surface of her own guilt.
“I don’t know how,” she mumbles, looking up at Alex, worn and heavy and so very tired of living apart.
Alex takes a deep breath and pushes up from the bed, shuffling over and settling down on the floor in front of Lucy, legs crossed and shins brushing against Lucy’s. She keeps her hands in her lap, prosthetic tucked under her left hand.
“I think I broke,” Lucy says into her knees. Her fingers flex and curl and reach for Alex without actually reaching, anchored around her legs. “I don’t know how to--”
“You don’t have to know,” Alex says quietly. “And you don’t have to do it alone. You have me, and Kara, and J’onn, and Susan. You’re not alone, Lucy, not if you don’t want to be.”
“Are you sure?” Lucy swallows against the pain in her throat, the way her brain yells for her to run even as her chest tells her to stay.
“Yes,” Alex says, firm and certain. She reaches out with her left hand, slow and careful like Lucy might bolt, until her thumb skims along Lucy’s cheekbone gently. “All you have to do is come home.” She scoots closer and leans forward just enough for her fingers to curl around the back of Lucy’s head, fingertips moving softly against her scalp and holding on until, minutes of silence later, Lucy finally nods and whispers “Okay.”
five
Lucy settles down to sit in the grass, tugging at her sweater to straighten it. She doesn’t move for long moments, staring down at the grass and pulling at a few blades before she takes a deep breath and looks up. It’s a beautiful day, clear and sunny and breezy, the first edges of summer pushing into the temperature.
The gravestone for James Olsen stares back at her, blank and cold, and she inhales sharply.
Two years, four months, one week, and three days have passed since she stood helplessly in the DEO and watched as four tons of concrete fell onto James and crushed him. She hasn’t been here since the day of the funerals. The gravestones for Mon-El and Winn flanks James’, identical and small in front of the towering monument rising behind them.
“Hi,” Lucy says softly. She shifts to cross her legs and pushes her hands down into the grass, pushing pushing until she can feel dirt shifting under her palms. “I’m sorry it took so long.”
She glances over her shoulder. Far behind her, at the edge of the park, Kara and Alex lean against the car, waiting for her. Kara has her head on Alex’s shoulder and even from the distance between them the sad tilt to her smile is evident. Alex’s prosthetic hand glints in the sunlight. She stopped wearing the glove two months after Lucy moved back to National City, waiting and waiting and waiting until Lucy could look at it without flinching.
Lucy turns back to face the headstones. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save you,” she says. “All of you. Any of you. I guess it’s not my fault. Maybe they’re right when they say that. But I’ll always wonder if I could have done more.” She clears her throat and swipes at her eyes with the back of her hand. “We all miss you all. So much. Kara is doing okay now, better than most of us, but she misses you guys. Especially you,” she adds, reaching out to trace the J in front of her. “I especially miss you, too, you gigantic asshole.”
She sniffs and inhales carefully. “I was gone for a while. I fell apart, I guess. I wound up working for my dad, doing stupid paperwork, because I was scared and guilty and I just-- God, I miss you.” She sniffs again, wiping uselessly at her eyes, and pulls her knees up towards her chest.
“I think I’m going to be okay,” she says after a long silence. “Alex and I are--” She cuts herself off and glances over her shoulder again. Kara and Alex are moving towards her, slow and steady, and she smiles even as her eyes water. “I think we’re happy.”
She turns back to face the headstones. “I just keep trying to think about the future. Not that I want to forget about any of you-- well, Winn, let’s be clear, I could forget about all of your creepy action figures and be okay with that-- but I’m trying to move forward.”
Footsteps sound in the grass behind her, and Kara settles down on her left, Alex on her right. Lucy smiles, watery but real, and leans instinctively into Alex’s side. Kara reaches over and takes Lucy’s hand in both of hers, holding on tight, and Lucy holds on just as tight and stretches her other arm over Alex’s shoulders, draping her hand over and wiggling her fingers until Alex reaches up to wind their fingers together. The metal and plastic and wires of the prosthetic are cool against her skin, and Lucy tilts her head onto Alex’s shoulder lazily. She doesn't flinch anymore at the feel of Alex's prosthetic and there are no longer automatic twinges of guilt pulling at her stomach whenever she sees it. She's not better yet, not whole in the way she was two years, four months, one week, and four days ago, but she's moving towards that.
Alex cranes her neck around and presses a kiss to the top of Lucy's head, holding there for long seconds before looking forward again. Lucy doesn't move, fingers tight around Alex's and head on her shoulder, anchored at her side.
Lucy sits there in front of the graves of half of the family she’d built for herself, her girlfriend on one side and best friend on the other, and smiles. This is home.
i believe, i believe
and tell myself to think forward
i will show i believe
and hold you up and know that you're all i see in the light
would it be enough to go by
if there's moonlight pulling the tide
would it be enough to live on
if my love could keep you alive