"Purple plug into port sixteen-two and…we're off," Alex takes away her hands, Winn watching the machine closely as he powers it on. It hums, turning a dim yellow before the archway by the wall sparks, a part in the other side exploding.
"Shit-"
"Turn it off," Alex orders, grabbing the fire extinguisher, letting it rip as she sees a small flame. White flies out the nozzle as Winn swears under his breath.
"What went wrong? We did everything in order and the coordinates had the decimal point in the right place this time!" Winn runs a hand through his head before pausing. "Oh. Oh…"
"What?"
"Time!" Winn exclaims as Alex finishes putting out the fire, turning to her lab partner. "So, this engine, we know it can teleport things through space. Minnie the Rat will never be the same again."
"May her successors be braver," Alex adds.
"Agreed." Winn nods hurriedly, before rushing over to the whiteboard full of notes on the device's insides. "We took the original box apart and…what? We knew that the second console was some sort of stuck clock showing the present time in Greenwich Mean and it wouldn't stop doing that. We couldn't do anything with it and we didn't know what it was. But why would a teleporter need a clock unless…"
"Time," Alex repeats, eyes widening. "We reverse-engineered a broken space-time teleporter, not just a teleporter."
Winn grins, putting his hand out for a fist-bump, which Alex returns before he goes to the terminal, turning to the computer programming. He scrolls through it, pointing out the anomalous coding where they'd found an error in the original artefact and subsequently decided to cordon off in the larger version.
"We need to fix this."
"How though?" Alex leans over, scanning it.
"If we think of it like this," Winn starts, crossing his arms, "the current clock, in sync with real time, is still running. If the teleporter has the capacity for time travelling along with space travel, it needs to know when it's from."
"Where and when home base is," Alex clarifies, spotting something in the code. Winn shrugs as Alex tentatively highlights a bit of code, circling it with a pen overlay. "That. I don't think we can change this or should."
"I agree," Winn nods, before they grab some chairs, sitting down and going over it, pinging ideas off each other.
A couple of hours later, J'onn comes in to check up on them. "Hey."
"Hey," Alex smiles at him briefly. "What's up?"
J'onn chuckles. "What's up is the fact that you should have gone home half an hour ago – both of you. Have you even eaten?"
Alex and Winn exchange a guilty expression, before Alex feels a twinge from her stomach. I'm starving, Alex thinks, J'onn picking up her surface thoughts with a chuckle.
"Go home, agents. All this will still be waiting for you when you get back."
"It'd better," Winn says, getting up. "We had a break-through."
"Oh?" J'onn raises an eyebrow.
"Yeah," Alex confirms, leaning down to grab her shoes, which she'd kicked off at some point. She speaks as she pulls them on, tying her laces. "We think that it can send things through time, too."
"Time travel…" J'onn mutters, brow furrowing. "Are you sure?"
"Define sure," Winn replies.
When Alex gets home that night, coding is swimming in front of her eyes, but her brain isn't taking any of it in. She drops into bed after eating a boxed sweet potato salad from her fridge, belatedly thinking her bed is too cold before realising that it's cold because there's no-one's to warm it for her anymore.
Bathroom light left on and shining on her face, Alex forgets about space-time teleportation devices for a minute, thinking of her. Red hair and that damned white streak, the most horrifying fight for her life and jamming a glowing green kryptonite sword through her back.
Alex smells the pillow she doesn't sleep on, but Eliza washed it when she came over to Alex's apartment to spend the week, looking after both of her daughters in their shared, but different grief. Flower-fresh fills her senses instead of Astra.
"I miss you," she says, remembering being there in bed with her, arm curling around her waist and their lips colliding. Astra had been so warm and solid and Alex misses her. "Could have been…"
I love…I love you both, Astra had said, as she was dying in Kara's arms, mouth open in a silent gasp of pain. Her eyes had flickered between them both but she'd locked in on Kara. Alex doesn't blame her, she never could blame her for that. Kara is so special and Alex would look at Kara too, when she was dying.
"I miss you," Alex says again to empty air, thinking of Astra's pod in the sky, sent up into the sun to be burned to ashes. She breathes in the flower-fresh pillow, trying and failing not to cry as her grief pounds at her heart.
The next morning when she wakes to the blaring of her alarm, it doesn't take her long to realise her positioning is weird, laying practically horizontal in bed on Astra's pillow. I've got to get to work, she thinks at the pillow, looking at it for a few moments before kissing it once, feeling like it's not enough. It isn't enough.
Alex wonders if her grief will just…go away and stop making her life seem so depressing.
Her phone swooshes. Grateful for the distraction, Alex picks it up, seeing a reminder she set for herself to pick up Vasquez's cat for her at seven from the vet. Groaning, Alex gets out of bed, going through her morning routine, running on her treadmill for an hour rather than going to the gym before work.
After she's showered and dressed, Alex goes to pick up Vasquez's cat. The vet warily hands over the cat basket and his meds, murmuring don't wake this hell-beast. Alex, not impressed, takes the bag and plastic cat-container, checking on Morrissey through the grate once she's in her car.
"How was your surgery, big guy?" Alex questions, wincing at the big patch of shaved hair on his back. Morrissey isn't her favourite animal – Alex has scars from the Maine Coon Vasquez likes to call her little kitty – but back surgery isn't nice, even on the fancy pain meds Vasquez is paying for.
From how the butterfly stitches are holding his healing skin together, Alex guesses the vets did an alright-enough job, though. "Let's get you back to your mom," Alex says, before starting the car and driving to Vasquez's apartment.
When she arrives, an unfamiliar Latina woman in pyjamas holding back a ginormous black Newfoundland opens the door.
"You got the hell-cat?" she questions, before tugging at the dogs collar. "McCartney, get back, fucking god – just a minute." The woman shuts the door and Alex waits as she wrangles her dog, faintly relieved that it doesn't take too long. "Sorry."
"It's no trouble," Alex says, holding out the bag of pain meds. "Morrissey's medication. Instructions are inside, but the vet said to mix two sachets in with his food. I'm Alex, by the way, Alex Danvers. I work with Vasquez."
"Maggie. Maggie Sawyer – Susie's girlfriend." Maggie introduces herself, before taking the cat-box. "Thanks. Oh, Susie phoned me last night. She said to thank you for this and to give you…" Maggie reaches into her back-pocket, taking out a wad of cash as she precariously balances the bottom of the cat box on her bent knee. "This. Said she owed you."
"Ahh…" Alex smiles smugly, counting out the bills. "Awesome. She bet more than she could buy last game night."
"Susie did say something like that," Maggie chuckles, before tilting her head back. "You want a coffee?"
"I've got to get to work," Alex says apologetically. "Maybe another time."
"Cool. Thanks again for picking up Morrissey," Maggie nods goodbye, before shutting the door. Alex returns to her car, sighing at the sight of cat-hair on the seat the box had been on before simply driving to work.
"I think I've got it," Winn says around noon, before going right over to the terminal and starting to adjust the coding. Alex bolts up, watching the changes as they happen, not quite seeing where he's going until he goes to a different part of the programming to add in a new function.
"Winn, let it be known that I was the one who recruited you from website design and got you working on time travel," Alex stands up straight, patting his shoulder as another techie comes over, pronouncing the repairs to be finished. Alex glances at them before looking to the arch, already thinking up a design to retrofit into the mechanics.
"Thanks. Think you can stay our lackeys a bit longer rather than go off on break?"
"Do you need anything else?" they question.
Alex starts to think about it, but before she can even come up with the first thing she'd need, Winn rattles off a list of items. The techie leaves to fetch everything, Alex raising an eyebrow in Winn's direction.
"What?" he questions when he sees her look. "I've been thinking about this all night! All week!"
"…fine," Alex looks away, at the arch. "When and where do we go first, then?"
"If we set up a room that can only be opened from the inside-" Winn starts.
"We've got one of those," Alex says. "It's called a bunker. I'll go ask the Director about using it if you deal with the rest of the installation here."
"As long as you get me a sandwich," Winn bargains, causing Alex to smirk and Winn to subsequently add, "one I actually like."
Later that evening, they power it all up again, like they did yesterday. Lucy looks on through the glass, talking to J'onn as she does and there's a part of Alex that still thinks it's unfair that J'onn isn't Director – but still, she's glad Lucy's in charge, rather than someone like her father.
As Winn starts the arch up, the yellow light appears again, but this time instead of sparking up the arch, it hums and the moving pieces start to move, pumping and turning. Then, yellow lightning starts to flash across, back and forth.
"Woah!" Alex steps back, unlike the techies, who don't seem to have any self-preservation at all as they step forwards, releasing the three test-rats through the portal, one by one. Each time one goes through, the lights in the base dim, immediately making Alex think there's not enough power wired into the machine.
"Prepare for arch shutdown," Winn calls, the techies stepping back as he begins the shutdown sequence. Almost immediately, the yellow lightning disappears and then all that's left is the loud humming and the movement. Winn presses a few buttons. "Okay, something's gone wrong."
Alex looks at the computer, alarmed at the SHUTDOWN COMPLETE message when very clearly, the arch is still active.
"What's going on?" Lucy asks through the speaker.
"I don't know," Winn calls. "It won't turn off!"
"Let's cut the power," Alex says as she catches sight of the fluid in the hydraulics of the arch – the unknown fluid they found in the original device that they'd found expanded in on itself if put in contact with magnesium, creating more and more fluid until the magnesium was removed – bubbling.
Stepping closer, Alex eyes the visible fluid. One day, we'll have a casing over this, she thinks, happy for now that they don't. The fluids simmer in the hydraulics, still moving up and down and around. Grabbing a plastic stick from a nearby table, Alex reaches out to the archway, passing the stick through the space.
Immediately, the end of the stick disappears.
"Mark a new rat with a bright colour," she orders the nearest techie, taking the stick away from the arch and finding the disappeared end melted and dripping. "Get me a tray for this."
A new rat is procured and the stick taken away. Alex watches the techie mark it with pink, unlike the green, blue and brown markers on the other rats, already sent through. Once it's coloured, it's released. Alex is provided with a new plastic stick to wave through the arch. Like the last stick, it disappears and then returns melting when removed.
"Can we check the bunker, now?" Winn asks.
Alex looks up from her melted plastic stick.
"Sure."
The bunker is obviously not un-openable from the outside. However, Alex suggested it because if they had a living, human time-traveller, they would be able to lock it until the potential paradox passed.
When they open the door from the outside, the small entrance hall, already emptied for their experiment, has three live rats sleeping in the corner. It also has a melted pile of white plastic and the dry, crispy remains of rat #4.
"Block the arch off," J'onn orders. "Make sure no living creature can get anywhere near it."
"It's a power problem, I think," Alex says when they return to the lab, the techies putting yellow tape on the floor and putting up physical markers in the form of tall orange flags. "The first three rats haven't woken up yet and according to the techies, there's no sign of them having moved anywhere except towards the corner. The arch must have sucked some form of…energy out of them to work."
"And because we shut down part of the machine," Winn snaps his fingers, "it needed to find the energy to work. See: melted plastic and the dead rat number four."
"So," Lucy glances at the arch, "we basically have to either leave a death trap on or leave a fully-powered time machine on."
"That's a hell of a choice," J'onn shakes his head, hands on his hips. "Frankly, Director, thinking about the implications of leaving a time machine on concern me more than a death trap. If anyone- anyone found out about it, we could have all types of time disaster on our hands."
Alex and Winn share a glance.
"We can fix it," Alex says. "We will fix it."
"I trust your judgement, Agent Danvers," Lucy replies. "But I just want the two of you on this. Agent J'onzz is right – paradoxes are more concerning than anyone getting hurt, right now. Only you two get to go in that room, unless they're supervised by one of us," Lucy says, motioning to J'onn. "And no time-travelling.
"Yes, Director Lane," Alex says, Winn copying her a few moments later.
"How the hell do we fix this?" Alex groans, leaning back in her chair. If not for the death-arch across the room, it would be like any other brain-storming session.
Winn throws a balled-up piece of paper at her head. "We need more data. How much power needs to be used by a de-powered arch? How much power needs to be used by a de-powered arch for travelling an hour back in time versus a day? How much power needs to be used by a de-powered arch for travelling across certain amounts of space? And all that on a powered arch, as well!"
"Lucy said no time travel," Alex mutters, despite knowing that they need to know these parameters. "We've made an unfathomable machine and we don't know its limits."
"Like the computer."
"Like the wheel."
"Like sandwich flavours."
Alex looks to Winn, who's looking at her with a vaguely dirty expression. "There were literally no other sandwiches in the vending machine."
"Or so you say," Winn mutters darkly. "I hate pastrami."
Rolling her eyes, Alex turns in her spinning chair to look at the arch. No time-travelling…
"Hey, Winn? Do you think the same thing would happen if we tried teleporting through space alone? No time-travel involved?"
Winn is silent for a moment, then he grins, twisting in his chair to the computer. "Loopholes!"
Sitting up properly, Alex wheels over to look over his shoulder. "So, if we set it to match the home-clock and then…here. No time-travel, no paradoxes. Put me five feet in front of the arch."
"On it," Winn says, before stopping, glancing back at her, incredulous. "Wait, what? You?"
"I don't like handling animals." Alex raises an eyebrow, "Are you willing to put a rat through a teleporter and catch it afterwards?"
Winn groans, but looks back to the screen, finishing adjusting the code. "Maybe we could get Kara to go through instead."
"No. Definitely not," Alex says, before starting up the arch. The yellow lightning appears and the two of them stare at it for a few seconds. "Do you think it hurts?"
"Don't know. That's what you're about to find out, right?"
"Right," Alex mutters. "Right."
Stand up. It's just a little teleportation.
Alex gets off her chair, calmly walking over to the arch. The yellow lightning fizzles and pops. It almost hurts her eyes to look at it. As she gets closer, Alex feels static and a deep thrumming in her veins that makes her bones ache.
It's just a little teleportation.
You'll appear five feet behind you. Five feet.
No time travel involved.
Taking a deep breath, Alex walks through the lightning-
-and steps out in the middle of the room, Winn's eyes flickering from the arch to her. Alex stares at him, before the sensations catch up with her.
Groaning, she stumbles back over to her chair, sitting down and reaching over to Winn's uneaten pastrami sandwich. Taking a bite off the corner, Alex puts it down and reaches for the wastepaper bin, hoping the food will settle her stomach and she won't throw up.
"Are you going to throw up? What's teleportation like? Do you feel any negative effects? Did you see anything-"
Alex's stomach curls and she throws up.
"It was like walking through a cloud of static, except I felt horrible after rather than electrified," Alex mutters, simultaneously writing her report of the situation while it's still fresh. "I was just bulldozed by- by travel sickness or something and I had no time to adjust."
"I didn't know you got travel-sick," Winn says. "Is it like boats or-"
"Flying." Alex snorts. "Yeah, I know, ironic when I have a sister who gives me a ride every so often and when I jump out of helicopters for a living." Alex shakes her head, noting down what she can. Really, the report isn't even half a page long. "I should go to medical, get a check-up."
"You've no baseline so it'd be pointless," Winn points out. Alex tilts her head in acknowledgement. "Want to try somewhere else?"
Alex glances at him. "I just want to go home."
"Then go home," Winn suggests, trying and failing to look innocent. Alex narrows her eyes.
"My car is here. I've got to drive to work tomorrow. If it didn't escape you, we work in a desert."
"One word: carpool."
Winn looks at Alex with a please, please, please let me do this face. Alex instinctually wants to ignore it, but in truth, the prospect of teleporting again just makes her feel excited. Her hesitation is the only confirmation Winn apparently needs though, because he calculates the coordinates of her apartment, asking her about any obstacles.
"Uh…just…can you put me in front of my door?"
"That's clever," Winn notes, before programming the machine, turning it off and then on again to do so. "Text me immediately after you arrive, okay, so I know you're alive."
"I will," Alex promises, before stepping forwards. As she gets closer, there's a strange lack of static, however. She wonders if it's because she's already been through once before or for another reason. Stepping through, Alex finds herself in her apartment, stepping through and immediately feeling the drain.
Wobbly, Alex staggers to her kitchen sink, in case she feels sick again. However, that 'travel sick' feel doesn't return, so she takes out her phone from her pocket and texts Winn.
A: Back at my apartment, safe and sound.
Looking at the time on her phone, Alex frowns as she watches it change suddenly, the 23:03 turning into 00:04. Looking up at the clock on her wall, Alex sees it's midnight and has a sudden foreboding. She texts Winn again.
A: What did you do?
Watching for Winn's reply, Alex gets one shortly.
W: Sorry, had to check! How was the trip through time?
"Winn!" Alex hisses, before phoning him direct. He picks up and she immediately shouts at him. "What the actual hell, Winn? Lucy said not to! You just defied a direct superior and implicated me!"
"What was it like, Alex?" Winn presses.
"Winn!"
He doesn't let up. "You just travelled forwards in time, Alex, c'mon! Was it different? How are you holding up?"
"My legs feel like jelly," Alex mutters darkly, "but I'm otherwise fine. Did you turn the arch off?"
"Ages ago. I'm home and everything. I collected your stuff, by the way, because you forgot it all."
"I did, didn't I?" Alex mumbles, forcing herself to calm down. "I practically ran through that arch."
"Are you going to report everything?"
Alex sighs.
"Alex?"
"…the longer no-one knows, the longer we have full access like this." Alex rubs her forehead, leaning against her counter-top. "What I don't understand is how the rats were so drained and I'm just queasy."
"Maybe it burned through energy stores? Fat stores?" Winn suggests. "Have you weighed yourself recently?"
"Last week," Alex says, catching on. "I'll check it again, just a minute." Going to her bathroom, Alex turns her scales on, putting her phone on speaker as she sets it down.
"So? What's the verdict?"
"Well, I've gained a couple of pounds, apparently," Alex says, miffed. "Wouldn't the techies have checked the rats' weight anyway? They would have mentioned it if something was off."
"Right," Winn says, sounding embarrassed, before he yawns. "I'll come pick you up tomorrow. What time do you want to get in? Eight?"
"Seven, half past at the latest," Alex replies.
"I am not getting up that early," Winn denies.
"Yes, you are." Alex replies, "Or I will sic J'onn on you for making me late."
"Ughhh, I hate you," Winn moans, before hanging up.
