"Some periods of our growth are so confusing or painful that we don't even recognize that growth is happening. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger than we were before. "

Alex Danvers had growing pains. She didn't even know it was possible to change this late. She'd figured that after the teen years, more or less, you were who you were. You'd grey out a bit, maybe pick up a hobby or two, but you, the core you, what made you tick, that wouldn't shift again, outside of extraordinary circumstances.

So she guessed these circumstances must've counted as extraordinary.

To be fair, a lot of her life might've counted as extraordinary. By no fault of her own.

It wasn't her choice to take in an alien baby sister, and it wasn't her choice to become attached to said alien baby sister, and it certainly wasn't her choice for that attachment to develop further, to become... what it had became.

Certainty had been pointedly lacking in her life as of late. There was her little crisis about Maggie, and all that that meant for her. But now... even that felt like a precursor, more than anything. It was a strange way to frame it, but Alex had settled on the metaphor of a fighting a henchmen before a boss battle.

It had been overwhelming at first, realising that she liked women. Exclusively. It was something Alex thought she might never adjust to. But she did, with no shortage of help and support from the people who mattered most to her. And now that it was done, and she was out, to Kara and to her mother and to all their friends, even Mon-El, Alex was left with the feeling that all of it was just too easy.

No, that wasn't quite it.

It wasn't that it had been easy (it wasn't), it was just that something about it didn't feel finished. Some piece in her brain was still unsettled, a brick refusing to fall into place. And it was that feeling, that constant low grade anticipation, that made something about that night just a little ominous.

She had had plans with Kara to watch Homeland, but a bank robbery and subsequent hostage crisis has left her put out for the rest of the foreseeable evening. Instead, Alex had started to watch the episode herself, but it wasn't the same without being able to look over and see Kara's exaggerated reaction to every dramatic reveal on the show. She switched it off about twenty minutes in, recording the rest, and vowing to do her best to avoid spoilers.

She picked up her empty glass when she rose from the couch on her way to the kitchen. She set the dish down with the others, about three days worth of pile up, and made a note to get to that... eventually. Alex had, could, and would reuse cutlery in necessary.

Alex walked slowly to her bedroom. It was early for her to turn in, but she had nothing left to accomplish that day, so figured a little extra rest couldn't hurt. As part of her ritual, she checked her phone one last time, making sure no urgent news from Kara or the DEO had gone unnoticed. She didn't want to wake up to an apocalypse.

Instead, there was a message from Maggie. She smiled to herself, alone in her room, and sat back on the bed feeling just a little lighter.

Have fun with your sister tonight, but I've got dibs on you tomorrow ;)

Alex typed out a quick goodnight message and set her phone down on the bedside table. On the way to the bathroom, she grabbed a clean set of pajamas to change into.

Alex shut the bathroom door behind herself. Even though she lived alone, she always did. After sharing a bathroom with Kara growing up, that was one habit that Alex didn't think she'd ever get out of. Alex went through her bedtime routine on autopilot, not thinking about what she was doing, not looking at anything, not even her own reflection in the mirror. Her mind was stuck elsewhere, stuck in the thoughts that had been plaguing her for the last few weeks. And, as Alex was slowly realising, for probably much longer than that, too.

It was only after she spit and rinsed out the sink that Alex finally saw herself in the mirror. It was something she'd seen a million times. Alex knew what her own face looked like, and normally, she was pretty okay with it. She knew she wasn't unattractive. She didn't hate herself. She wasn't deformed, there was nothing explicitly wrong with the picture that was looking back at her.

That's why she was so unsettled by the feeling that, implicitly, there was.

Alex wasn't sure exactly why the idea came into her head, or why she follow it through with action, but soon she was on her knees with the cupboard under the sink open, rifling through it. She pushed aside cotton swabs and cleaning chemicals and a bobby pins so eroded and rusted by moisture and time they were little more than stains.

It was such an identity crisis thing to do. Alex was well aware of that. A Hollywood go to for 'reinvention'. It was practically a goddamn trope. Still, as Alex tilted her head to one side, and finally saw the glint of the scissors pushed near the back of the cabinet, it just felt like it was an inevitable step.

Alex stood back up with the tool grasped tightly.

With her right hand, she grabbed her hair in a tight fist. With her left hand, she moved the scissors, eyeing herself down in the mirror to try and get as accurate a cut as was possible when your hands were shaking like that.

She closed her eyes when she snipped. When she opened them, there was a twisted brown lock at the bottom of the sink, and her hand itched to repeat the motion.

So she did.

Again and again, Alex held the hair with her right hand, and cut with her left. It was messy, to be sure, but what Alex was going for was so simple that there wasn't really much to fuck up.

What she was going for, quite simply, was short. She had no parameters aside from that, no mental image she was going for. All she knew was that when she had seen herself in the mirror, only a couple of minutes ago, something in her had screamed that the hanging sides of her hair had to go, like her own body was recalling the keratin closer to the skin. A biological impulse.

Alex wasn't sure when she could consider herself finished. She thought she had hit every hair on her hair at least once, even the ones that were already shortish to begin with. Eventually, she put down the scissors when she almost clipped her ear open.

Alex's eyes were focused on the bottom of the sink. Or, since she couldn't see the bottom anymore, she started at the odd pattern of reddish brown dips and curves that obscured it. Her knuckles were turning white around the porcelain.

Alex took one more deep breath before she looked up.

"Whoa."

It was short, alright. Or perhaps it was just short to Alex, who had never gone through a pixie cut phase. Logically, she knew that he phase was completely unchanged, but something about how it was framed now... it felt to Alex as if she was looked a version slightly scewed. A Bizzaro, if you would. Alex had seen her face a million times, at a million ages and half ages and quarter ages and at the fractions between those. She had seen herself smiling in photos, and pissed off in photos, and obviously uncomfortable in photos, and sometimes she saw those things in the mirror, too.

She had never seen this.

Alex felt her heart speeding up, kicked up by adrenaline. Really, she knew there was no reason to be reacting like this. She was alone, in her apartment bathroom, looking in the mirror, but her body was reacting like when she tangled with Red K Kara.

Fight or flight, a basic response. Her body was preparing on instinct, for something. The ominous haze over the evening became sharper, more defined. It settled over Alex's shoulders and she tried to swallow, but her mouth was too dry.

Her body knew before she did. It was something like how elephants would walk the same path for a thousand years, or how fifteen million monarch butterflies find their way to California for the winter time, something below the brain but pushing up, something like magnetic fields, something like that. A great migration to a homeland she'd never seen. A brain preparing to accept truth, on the precipice of it, just about ready for everything to fall into place.

She had told Maggie, in the medical room, that she finally 'got herself'. But that had been a lie, hadn't it? Or an exaggeration, at the very least.

Alex could have made the pieces fit, if she pushed hard enough. Or if she stood at a far enough distance, it checked out fine.

But Alex didn't have the advantage of keeping herself at a distance.

Alex tilted her head this way and that, searching for the right angles. Up, to stretch the column of her throat. Left and right, biting her rows of teeth down on each other to observe the effect it had on her jaw. She traced the lines of her face, her cheekbones, her eyebrows, her jaw, and she could have sworn her fingertips burned.

"Oh god," Alex said, hands back on the edge of the sink, staring dead ahead, into those eyes, the same eyes as always, but implicitly different, too. Alex had looked at this face a million times, in a million ways, but had never seen. But Alex could see, now.

Alex could see himself.