It was like the black mercy all over again.
Only this time it wasn't her perfect, hyperactive sister lying on a table in the DEO medical ward with an oxygen mask on her face.
It was her girlfriend.
One moment Maggie had been fine. Cracking a joke about the state of Alex's apartment after a few nights of working late and coming home to takeout food and liquor. The next thing Alex knew, Maggie was clutching her neck with a pained look as she tumbled to the ground.
The agent's heart had stopped. She yelled out Maggie's name, fell to her knees next to her, and saw to her horror that a puncture wound underneath her ear was beginning to spread a black, scary substance through Maggie's body. She'd held the woman as she called Kara, unable to form any coherent thought on how to help her. Her training being overshadowed bythe sight of her unmoving girlfriend.
Kara had been at her apartment in less than thirty seconds, picking Maggie up and flying her to the DEO, where she met up with J'onn and Winn, and explained what happened, based on the few sensible words Alex had managed to give.
When Alex herself arrived, they'd already made Maggie comfortable in the ward. And the entire situation felt so familiar, only now Kara was by her side holding her around the waist.
"Have you seen this before?" She whispered to her sister. Kara looked unsure. "It looks similar to the black mercy, but there are hundreds of parasites that are similar, and none of them have antidotes that can be made here on Earth."
That did nothing to calm Alex's nerves. "It was meant for me. It was in my apartment, it… It should have been me."
Her gaze settled carefully on J'onn, who had his arms folded and was examining the puncture wound. "I believe I know what we're dealing with. I've only seen it once here on Earth. It's a parasite that feeds on their victims by putting them in sleep, not unlike the black mercy."
"Then what does it do? She just sleeps?" Winn asked. J'onn sighed. "I don't know. I'm not sure, and I don't know how to counter its effect either."
"So we have nothing." Alex said quietly, slipping Maggie's hand into her own and intertwining their fingers together.
"Maybe we can fix it the way we fixed the black mercy?" Kara theorized. "What if we put me or Alex inside to convince her to come back?"
"That was a big risk." J'onn grunted. "I don't know if we should take it again."
"It worked last time." Alex shot back, looking him in the eyes. "I'll do it. Whatever it takes, it's the only option we have right now."
J'onn didn't seem thrilled by the idea, but he gave a sharp nod, and that was all the invitation Alex needed to rush outside, gathering the equipment they'd used the last time.
As she went back inside to connect the wires to the monitors and helmets, she felt her sister's eyes on her. "What?"
"Just… Be careful, okay? Last time… When you were there it took me so long to realize what was happening. Everything was so good, being back with my parents, you felt like an interruption. So just… Be patient with her. Don't let it get to you."
Alex gave a weak smile, and wrapped an arm around her sister. "I will. Thank you."
"Everything is set." Winn said, looking at the monitors in front of him. "Her heartrate and brain activity are stable."
"Good night." Kara held her sister's hand, as the agent glanced at her girlfriend's body one last time, before going everything went dark.
When Alex opened her eyes again, she was standing in the middle of a hallway. Much to her surprise, she found lockers and doors on either side, and figured Maggie was dreaming about school. But why would Maggie's perfect fantasy happen inside a school?
As she looked around, she finally spotted her girlfriend, standing on the other side of the hallway. She sighed in relief, and approached her cautiously, raising a careful hand out. "Maggie?"
If the detective heard her, she was doing a great job at hiding it, because Maggie seemed oblivious to Alex's voice. She took another step and spun around so that she was in front of Maggie, effectively blocking her view. "Hey, Maggie, it's me."
But her girlfriend kept staring at a spot that was now through Alex, and the agent turned around to see what exactly she was looking at.
Her stomach dropped.
A young, shy girl with black hair that was looking around nervously and approaching the two of them. Her dimples weren't that pronounced, yet Alex could have recognized her anywhere. She turned her head to see her actual girlfriend looking at the girl with a strange, sad look on her face.
"Is that… you?"
Maggie didn't respond, so Alex could only watch as the younger Maggie approached one of the lockers in front of them, looked around if anybody saw her, and with a nervous smile, grabbed a pink card out of her backpack and slipped it inside.
Alex's mouth went dry as she realized what she was watching. She turned back to her Maggie, who now had tears in her eyes, but didn't make a move to stop anything as she watched the younger version of herself run away down the hall.
Alex took a few steps in her direction, not knowing what to do since Maggie wouldn't talk to her, or possibly couldn't even hear her.
A new pair of footsteps down the hall made her turn around again.
"Oh God…" Alex heard Maggie's plea next to her as she watched her girlfriend squirm, a single tear finally making its way down her cheeks.
Another teenage girl, with dirty blonde hair tied in a ponytail, walked up to them and stopped at the locker that teenage Maggie had stopped at. She carelessly slung her back from over her shoulder, not noticing the two of them, and opened the lock with her combination. As she swung it open, the pink card fell out.
Alex felt Maggie turn away next to her, but she herself couldn't look away from the blonde girl picking the card up and reading through it, frowning more and more as she read on.
Her look morphed from curiosity, to surprise, and then to absolute disgust.
Alex heard a sob next to her, and turned around to finally face her girlfriend to try and comfort her, but when she did, she suddenly found herself in the middle of a living room that she didn't recognize.
The pictures on the wall showed the same blonde girl from the locker. Elisa Wilkey.
She was in the room, sitting down on the couch and crying. Her parents were standing upright, her father was pacing.
"I told you not to hang around with that girl!" Her father yelled. Elisa was crying. "Daddy, I didn't know, I swear!"
"We didn't raise you to hang around with sinners, Elisa." Her mother. Sounding more disappointed than anything, which made it all even worse.
"It's not her fault…" Alex heard fourth voice behind her, and turned around to see that Maggie was witnessing the same scene, and trying to talk to them, even though apparently neither of the parties could hear or see one another.
Alex wrapped an arm around Maggie's waist, but the detective didn't respond. Instead, she winced more at the things Elisa's parents were yelling.
"She's a filthy dyke, she'll corrupt you!"
"I'm not leaving it at this. I don't want her around you anymore!"
"Dad, I don't… I don't want to be around her anymore." Elisa whispered weakly. That was apparently the trigger for Maggie, as Alex witnessed her girlfriend having a total emotional breakdown. She fell to her knees trying to hug Maggie, but it was awkward and she knew that whatever she was doing didn't comfort her in the slightest.
"Please… Stop…" Maggie was begging to nobody in particular through her sobs and cries.
Alex felt her own tears fall down her cheeks freely, both at the sight of her girlfriend in so much pain, and at the situation in front of her. The things they said about Maggie. Her Maggie, her beautiful, brilliant, smart and funny Maggie…
She looked up just in time to see Elisa's father reaching for the telephone.
"Dad, what are you doing?!" Elisa sobbed.
"I'm going to call that house, to tell them that they can't live here with their sinful ways and expect us to sit around and get… infected."
As another tear fell down Alex's cheek at hearing those words, the room shifted once again, morphing into an other living room.
"No. No, no, no…" Maggie whimpered next to her. "God… Please…"
Alex reached for her hand, but it felt cold and distant, and she let go involuntarily as she looked around the room.
She recognized young Maggie sitting at the table doing her homework. Her father was sitting on the couch watching television. She heard the clattering of dishes, so she assumed Maggie's mother was in the kitchen.
The sound of a telephone made both Maggie and her father look up, but the man on the couch got up and walked over to the wall.
"No, don't… Don't pick up the phone!" Maggie next to her was now yelling at her father, running towards him and standing next to him, but achieving nothing as the man picked up the telephone anyway, and answered the call.
Alex watched, as Maggie continued to scream at her father, and when she realized that he couldn't hear her, she ran up to her younger self. "Leave! Run, go! Please!"
Hearing Maggie scream those words made her heart stop, as she watched Maggie's father hang up the phone and turning to his daughter. Maggie was stuck between the two, crying and yelling at both of them.
"Margaret!" Her father yelled out, scaring teenage Maggie into looking up. "What?!"
"NO!" Adult Maggie yelled, as her father moved forward, running up to his daughter and pulling her away from the table, shoving her off her chair. "You go around putting cards in other girls' lockers?! You think that's funny?!"
"No, dad, I just… I think I like her!" Teenage Maggie smiled weakly at her father. "She makes me laugh, and-…"
She had no time to continue, as her father grunted and yelled, and pulled her up by the hair, shoving her backwards. Maggie tripped over the rug and fell backwards, landing on the ground with a hard thud.
Alex was frozen. The 14-year old girl lying at her feet was crying and curled up into a ball. And as she looked up, the look on her girlfriend's face was something she'd never forget.
"Why didn't you run?!" Maggie cried out at her younger self. "Stop talking back!"
"But daddy, she was-…" A punch in the face. A kick. Another punch. Maggie's mother appeared in the doorway from the kitchen and for one second, Alex actually felt relieved that maybe her mother would help.
Instead, her father looked up at her mother. "The Wilkey's say that she put a card in their daughter's locker, saying how much she loved her and wanted to go to the dance with her!"
Maggie's mother stepped back, making a sign of the cross with her hand and shaking her head. "She needs to go."
"Mom!" The girl yelled hopelessly, in unison with adult Maggie, who kept on screaming at her mother. "You could have done something! You could have told him no! MOM!"
Neither of the two adults responded, as Maggie's father crouched to look his daughter in the eyes, giving her another slap to the cheek with the back of his hand. "You look at me. I want you gone. Now. Leave this house."
Maggie's protests were ignored by her father, who got back up, gave her another kick to the ribs and walked off into the kitchen.
Alex was frozen again. She couldn't move, she couldn't breathe. She couldn't think.
The way Maggie had told her the story before seemed like it had just been a bad fight. But this… This was not just a fight. This was horrible, and traumatizing, and…
She saw her girlfriend walk over to her younger self and look down at her in tears, before burying her face in her hands, her frame shaking with sobs, and repeating the same phrase over and over again. "I'm sorry… I'm sorry…"
Alex swallowed the lump in her throat, and whispered hoarsely. "Maggie…"
All of a sudden, Maggie's head shot up at the sound, and looked right at Alex.
The agent's heart skipped a beat. Could she finally see her? Could she finally do something about her girlfriend's pain?
Before either of them could continue the conversation, a blinding white light pulled them both in, and Alex closed her eyes, shielding herself from it.
When she opened her eyes again, she frowned at the concrete ceiling above her. It felt familiar, but she was disoriented and confused. She lifted her head up the slightest, before she felt a pair of arms supporting her. "Easy, easy…"
She looked up, to finally see her sister's shape coming into focus. "Kara…"
"You did it, Alex. She snapped out of it." Kara smiled proudly.
Alex looked up to see that the rest of the room was deserted. The other table, where Maggie had been on, was empty. Kara noticed her looking, and cleared her throat. "She woke up about ten minutes ago. She was… She didn't look good. She's resting in a bed in the ward."
"How long have we been out?"
"Five hours. Maybe six." Kara took a shaky breath. "It was, uh… Hard. It seemed like you were going through something rough."
"I…" Alex tried to form a sentence, but she couldn't. Kara put a hand on her shoulder quickly. "You don't have to talk about it. I didn't want to talk about it when I woke up from the black mercy."
"It wasn't… Like that. It wasn't her perfect world. It…" Alex felt tears brimming in her eyes again as she remembered what she'd witnessed. "I need to see her."
"She was crying. A lot. When she woke up. She hasn't said a word, she's just staring at the ceiling." Kara sighed sadly. Alex nodded, pulled out her wires and took off the helmet.
Kara helped her get up, as she was still a little dizzy and unstable, but she walked into the medical ward alone.
Maggie, at first, hadn't told her about all this. And in that moment, Alex realized why exactly Maggie had lied to her. Because this was traumatizing even for Alex to watch, let alone experience it at such a fragile age.
She understood why Maggie didn't want to burden Alex with that story when she was just coming out, to save her the fear, but now that the roles were reversed she wished that Maggie's story would have been better. That she wouldn't have been beaten relentlessly by her father, that her mother would have done something.
And the way Maggie was yelling at the scene made Alex realize that she still wasn't over it, after more than ten years. That she maybe still had nightmares about it, that she was still thinking about what would have happened.
She saw Maggie lying on the bed, and walked in slowly, knocking on the glass door. She saw Maggie's eyes flit to her form, and turn her head to watch her come in. Her eyes were red, she looked pale and shaky, but at least she was awake.
"How much did you see?" It was apparently the first thing she'd said all day. Her voice sounded hoarse and weak, and it broke Alex's heart. She moved over to her girlfriend's side and held her hand. "I think… All of it."
Maggie turned away from her, new tears appearing in her eyes. And Alex realized that there was nothing she could say or do in that moment that would possibly make Maggie feel better.
Though, despite how cruel it may have sounded, Alex was happy that she'd witnessed the scene, because it made her understand everything about the way Maggie was behaving, especially at the start of their relationship. Why Maggie was guarding her heart, why she protected Alex with lies that made everything somehow seem so much better.
Instead, she kissed Maggie's knuckles, one by one, and held her hand against her forehead. She didn't speak, but she had to let her know that she was with her. That she cared.
"I uh…" Maggie sniffed. "I managed to get out before he came back. When I was on the front porch, I fell down. Everything hurt. I couldn't breathe, I was bleeding. I saw my neighbors looking at me from their window, but they… They didn't help me."
Alex didn't know why Maggie was torturing herself by telling the rest of the story, but she grabbed Maggie's hand a little tighter to show her that she was listening, that Maggie was safe opening herself up to her.
"I managed to stumble a few roads down, to my aunt's house. She uh… She didn't really care about me that much… At first she called my parents to tell them that I was there with her, but my dad told her he didn't care." Maggie took a shaky breath and wiped at the tears on her cheeks. "I… I walked to school every day, made my own food, she barely talked to me. And when I was old enough… I moved out. And… That's how I came out. Now… Now you know the story."
"I love you." Alex simply said, looking at her as the detective smiled weakly, looking down at her hands. "I… I meant what I said, Alex. I wanted it to be better for you. I'm sorry you had to see that."
"No… Don't apologize." Alex shook her head. "You wanted to protect me. And… That just shows how incredible you are. That even with… That happening to you, you still…"
Alex trailed off. She'd said what she wanted to say. Maggie finally looked up to meet her eyes. "You're… You're the only person that made me… Forget. On Valentine's Day. You were there and I… For a few hours I could pretend that none of it happened."
Alex nodded, pressing another kiss to her hand. Maggie shuffled back on the bed, inviting Alex silently. The agent took a deep breath, and sat down onto the bed, wrapping her arms around Maggie's shoulders and resting her girlfriend's head on her collarbone. She rubbed her back, kissed the top of her head, and whispered softly that she loved her.