Alex sips her Scotch and soda - her fourth of the night - as she watches Maggie from across the bar.

She's not the only one.

Everyone else… well… they watch her too. They stare and they look and they do the only thing they really can do: they imagine. And, if she's being honest - which would, admittedly, be something new for her, at least in the last year - that's all Alex can do too. Imagine. Imagine what might be, which is, barely, a step better than imagining what was.

She's learned, slowly and painfully and with a fight every fucking step of the way, that imagining that, that even allowing herself a moment to remember what was… yeah… that's a road best not traveled.

Mostly because it's a road - a path, really - she can't travel. It may have taken every single moment of every one of the last three hundred and sixty-five days (damn near to the hour) but Alex has finally come to terms with the one inescapable certainty of her life. She's not going anywhere.

She's not going home and no, she's not thinking about that and she's sure as hell not thinking about how home is - or was - so much less a place and so much more a person or how, oddly enough, that person wasn't her sister. It's not that she doesn't miss Kara cause she does, Alex misses her more than she thought possible and she misses J'onn and Winn and James and, God help her, she even misses Mon El, though it would take a minor miracle - or, you know, hours and hours and hours of waterboarding - to get her to admit that.

"Sometimes," she told Eliza one night - when the scotch and sodas might have numbered a bit more than four - "I think about them and I play this… guessing game in my head. Trying to figure out what their lives are like now."

Kara, she's decided, finally had enough. Enough of being the second super, enough of Mon El and his accidental (and she so puts air quotes around that) sexism and not so accidental lies. It makes Alex a little - or a lot, definitely a lot - sad, but she thinks without her around to fall back on and to turn to and, sometimes, to weigh her down, Kara might well have finally become truly… super.

She's sure that J'onn is still J'onn, so basically he's still worrying and being that odd amalgam of dad and friend that he's always been. It's an odd line to straddle - odder still when you add in their actual dad - but Alex still finds it comforting, even now, to know that no matter what, Kara at least has him.

"She's strong," Alex says and she knows that's true, knows it's so much truer than even Kara knows and that it has so very little to do with yellow suns and powers and everything the rest of the world thinks is what makes her special. "But even the strongest of us still…"

Still need. Still want. Still has that ache for someone or something, that missing piece that makes you whole. Alex spent years thinking that, for her, that piece was her father. That solving his case, getting closure on his disappearance, saving him, somehow that would put it all right, would put her right. She knows better now, she's known that he wasn't that for her, right from the minute the stars blinked out of existence, right in front of her, from the second the Exodus ripped everything she'd ever known or loved away.

She'd known it before then, but she'd never admitted it, not to herself and certainly not out loud. But in that last moment, there was no hiding it then, and no point to trying, not anymore. Alex had taken one last deep breath of home, and it had slipped out, her truth floating away as all the air left her in a rush, the force of hopping dimensions nearly crushing her.

"Maggie."

So, yeah, here she sits. And stares. And does her damndest not to think of what was or what might have been. And makes sure to always stay just one scotch and soda on this side of what might be, because she knows this Maggie, she's not her Maggie and no, three hundred and sixty-five days or three hundred and sixty-five years won't change that.

She's spent so many nights like this, missing them - missing her - and Alex knows she always will, but tonight, she's decided, is the end of the rest. Tonight is the last night she's going to let herself give in to the urges, like that one she has to sink into her misery or the one where she drowns her sorrows or the one where she pretends she's not stalking a woman she doesn't know at all, even if she can describe every curve of her face, every line, every slope, every bit, in excruciatingly exact detail.

Sometimes, when she's a little too close to that line, Alex wonders if the parts of this Maggie that she can't see look as much like the parts of her Maggie as that face does. And those are the times when she slips out of the bar early and hightails it back across town and through the door of her apartment without saying a word to Eliza - or to anyone else - hiding beneath the covers on her bed, pretending that she's not wishing she was somewhere else, with someone else, and that sleeping alone hasn't kept her up most of the last three hundred plus nights. She's gotten good at that, at pretending.

She's had to.

Tonight, Alex swears, is the night that stops. Tonight is the night she walks out of her - walks, not runs - with her head held high and never looks back. A year is her limit and yeah, maybe it took the whole year for her to get it, for her to hit it, but now she has and so tonight is the end, the finish, the finale. Tonight, Alex Danvers stops hiding and regretting and mourning people who aren't dead, but gone and tonight is the night she starts doing what she's sure they're doing, what they've been doing.

Tonight, she starts living again.

You know, right after she finishes this drink. Or, maybe, the next one. No sense in rushing, right?

She's got all the time in the world.

Step one, Alex knows, is simple.

Get lucky.

She thinks it in her head and almost without warning, the thought of Mon El - because, really, who else? - snickering under his breath sneaks unbidden into her mind. Get lucky, he'd laugh, no doubt nudging Winn and grinning like a fifth grade fool, she said get lucky.

Yes, 'she' did, you dumbass Daxamite. And yes, she even meant it like that. Sort of.

She stares at Maggie behind the bar and OK, maybe she meant it like that a little more than sort of.

However she meant it, what it is, is the truth and not just the truth about finding someone you can be that way with, but the truth about everything. When it all comes right down to it, when it's all laid out there, so much of everything - life and love and death and all those little things that somehow fill in all the in betweens - they all amount to little more than luck. Everything is the roll of the dice, the cut of the deck, the whims of fate. It's the right place at the right time, the right words, or even just the less wrong ones. It's catching her gaze and then somehow, through some sleight of hand or some magic you never knew you had, holding it, keeping it, clutching onto it for dear life. And even that, even all those things we call love?

Still just luck.

Sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes just plain fucking dumb, but all times just luck. It's stumbling into showing affection without weakness (or too much strength), it's bumbling around in the dark and finding the ways to push (but not too hard) (just enough.) It's knowing when to hold, and when to fold and it's all about playing the odds and making the smart bets but Alex has played enough poker in her life to know that even that boils down to one simple truth.

Sometimes, you play it perfect. Sometimes, you make all the right calls and go all in on just the right hand and in the end? That damn luck… it just plays you.

You can do all the right things. Like, say, for example, planning to shut a ship down from the inside, trusting that you can and - if somehow you can't - knowing that she's out there, with her super speed and her super strength and, most of all, her super will to make sure that you won't, and she'll be right there with all the power in the world.

And, as luck would have it, it's just not enough.

"I don't regret it," she told Eliza one night. They were sitting together on the tiny balcony outside her apartment and, even in the dark, Alex saw the look on the older woman's face, that face she'd spent her entire life watching and learning and knowing and Alex saw it as clear as day. Eliza believed her.

As if she needed another reminder that this woman was not her mother.

Sometimes - times that come more and more often lately, and Alex fucking hates that but doesn't do anything to change it - she wishes that this Eliza was her Eliza or, maybe, more accurately, that she was her Alex. It's in that look, that belief, that instant acceptance of the lie as truth because, clearly, the Alex of this world wouldn't have regretted it for one second. Eliza's eyes say it all, that she would have looked at it as all for the greater good and her sacrifice as nothing more than a part of the job, a loss she was more than willing to risk, on the chance that she could save them all. All those aliens taken against their will - something they've got in common, now - were worth more. The good of the many and the good of the one and all that bullshit and Alex says she doesn't regret it because she has to.

She couldn't take the look in Eliza's eyes if she said different.

In a way, it's almost laughable, how even on a different Earth, there's still another Danvers - another fake and yes, she still thinks of her, of this world's Alex, as the imposter and yes, she knows that's about as absurd as you can possibly get - ahead of her in Eliza's eyes.

If it wasn't for bad luck, Alex isn't sure she'd have any at all.

Alex shakes her head cause no, she's not going to think about that - not again, not tonight - so she sips her drink and watches Maggie. She's not stupid or desperate or delusional enough (usually) to even try and convince herself that the woman behind the bar is her Maggie. No, Alex knows better than that, she always does.

Well… maybe not always. Usually. Typically. Most nights, as long as she stays on the right side of the drinks and, really, most nights?

Is about the most she can hope for.

Most nights, anyway. And most?

So this night, like most of them, Alex watches this Maggie work. It's not stalking, not really, or so she tells herself and, even if she's not exactly right, well… she doesn't really care.

"I've been yanked across dimensions," she told Jeremiah. "Pulled out of my own world like a cork shot out of a bottle and I landed down here, alone, lost, without anyone." She tried - with very little success - to ignore the pained look on his face or the gasp from Eliza. "I think maybe I'm entitled to a little… something."

And, so long as that something never made it past a few drinks and a few (or more than a few) stares and a little bit of a wandering, daydreaming mind, well, what's the harm, right?

(No, she doesn't count nights alone in her bed staring at pictures of Maggie on her phone until the tears blur her vision to the point where she can't tell her girlfriend from her sister as harm.)

So she grasps onto her little 'something', her nights spent in the back of the bar, hidden in plain sight behind the throng of the crowd. Mag's is almost always crowded, nearly always jammed almost past the point of breaking and Alex tells herself that's good, that's great. It's cover, she says. It's a shield, a way to blend in and disappear.

Not that Maggie would know her anyway.

But she tries not to think about that.

(Maybe someday it'll work.)

This is Alex's something, this is the thing that's kept her sane - a dubious distinction, at best - over the last three-sixty-five. Yes, she has Eliza and yes, she has Jeremiah and yes, they're a… comfort (of a sort) (a weird fucking sort) but they're not Maggie. And even though she knows that the woman behind the bar, so smooth and practiced and perfectly at home, isn't Maggie either, Alex also knows that that is her real something. It's all about the forgetting.

Forgetting, for just a few minutes every night that her Maggie is somewhere else, that she's, really, right there, just a vibrational frequency away. Her something is an escape, focusing on her - Maggie, real or not, hers or not - instead of on what the harm is or could be, or on all those deeper thoughts, about the philosophy and science of it all, the sheer luck (there it is again) and the utter chance of it all.

It's mind boggling, to say the least. Mind warping, to say the most. The simple math of every single domino that had to line up just right, had to fall so exactly, had to tip and topple and crash into one another in such an oddly beautiful and precise pattern to bring her here.

Another Earth, another city, another life.

And still, right to Maggie.

The scientist in her knows there's an explanation for all of that. An equation and a set of figures and numbers and formulas about trajectory and distance and Pythagorean something or other.

For those few minutes, for those few drinks? Alex lets the science fade and listens to the other part of her, the part that beats in her chest and thrums in her ears. The part that says fuck the formulas and the numbers and Pythagoras. It's not about that.

It's about her.

Sometimes, mostly on the nights she gets just a bit too close to the wrong side of those drinks, Alex finds herself thinking of the questions she never dares ask when she's sober. Are they all out there, somewhere, looking for her? Are they hopping from Earth to Earth, from haystack to haystack, all in quest of the proverbial needle, of her? Is Maggie leading the charge, crashing through breaches the way she used to crash through doors after suspects? Never giving up, never taking a single no, always believing that they're just one more Earth away?

It wasn't this one, it'll be the next one and it doesn't matter if the next one is the next or the next next or the next next next. They will find her.

For about a hundred of those three-sixty-five, Alex knew that was true. And for the next hundred and fifty (give or take) she was positive they were coming. And for the last hundred and ten, the last one fifteen?

All those nights, the simplest and clearest fact of them all has clattered around the inside of her head, rattling back and forth like the ice in her glass.

How can they find her? She can't even find herself.

This, Alex knows, is home now. Not just 'for now' but maybe 'for ever'. And she still doesn't really know where this is. Oh, she understands the concept of it all - the multiverse of infinite Earths, all with messes and crises all their own - but it's just that. A concept. One that begs the question.

Which here is here.

She's gotten in the habit of talking about it with herself every morning. She stares herself in the eye, right after her ice cold shower and scalding cup of coffee - her daily one-two punch that reminds her that she's alive and this isn't, you know, just her personal hell - and she asks herself.

"Today?"

Earth 74.

"Tomorrow?"

Earth 143.

"Next week?"

She's feeling ambitious. Earth 1756.

Eventually, Alex figures, she'll get bored with the numbers. Maybe she'll start lettering them. Earth Q and Earth Y and Earth Double-A.

You know, to keep it fresh.

She wonders, sometimes, what Maggie - this Maggie - would say if she told her the truth. It'd be a hell of a pick up line, right?

"Hey, just so you know? Where I'm from? You. Me. It's a thing."

And those sometimes? Those are the sometimes when Alex knows she's crossed to the wrong side of the drinks and she makes her way, slowly (and no, she's not stalling at all) to the bar and pays her tab and leaves a tip and every time - those sometimes and all the other sometimes, too - there's her card, her business card from her job cause she has one of those here, tucked under the bottom most bill.

And every time - every time - she slips it back out before Maggie plucks the cash from the bar, just a moment before it's a moment too late. Because here, all there is is a woman behind a bar who isn't quite who Alex wants her to be, but she's all Alex's got, even if she's absolutely sure that's not ever going to be even close to good enough.

She takes another slow sip and wishes, not for the first time, that she'd ordered something a little bit stronger. But Alex knows. Stronger drink equals dumber her and, no matter, how broken she is, no matter how close she sometimes (read: all the times) feels to dead and gone? She's still not ready to finish the job.

And going to bed with Maggie? Oh, that would finish it in spades.

And thinking about thinking about that? Yeah. It's time to go.

Alex slips through the crowd, surprised - again, not for the first time - at how many faces she knows, how many friendly, almost conspiratorial smiles those faces send her way. This, she guesses, is the way it happens, the slow and subtle way a place you live morphs into… home.

Yeah. Definitely time to go.

She drops the money on the bar, no card this time because, well, no time. Alex needs to not be here and, since she can't actually be really not here, she'll settle for not in here, not in the bar, in Maggie's bar, Maggie's world, and she'll settle for it as quickly as she can, just dropping the money and finding her way through the crowd and out the side entrance and into the cool night air without looking back.

That is, she realizes later, her first mistake.

"Early night?"

It's that moment - that precise moment - when Alex realizes she hasn't actually heard Maggie, not in months (twelve of them, if you're counting.) She hadn't realized it, hadn't once thought of the other reason staying so far back from the bar worked for her. It wasn't just hiding her.

Maggie - not her Maggie and that's a distinction Alex knows she's gotta keep making in her head cause, Lord knows, her heart stopped listening the very moment her ears heard - leans against the wall just outside the door. There's a nearly gone cigarette flickering between two of her fingers and it's all Alex can do not to say 'you don't smoke'. She's eyeing Alex in a very hungry, very no bullshit, very un-Maggie like way and that should make this easier

It doesn't.

It so doesn't.

"I… um… I…"

Smooth, Danvers. Like Mon-fucking-El smooth.

Maggie nods. "Got it," she says and there's a smirk playing at the corners of her lips and that is so very Maggie that it almost hurts. "I um quite a bit too. Usually only on weekends, but it's Friday, so close enough, right?"

She pushes off the wall, dropping the cigarette to the pavement and grinding it under her heel with something like extreme prejudice.

"Nasty things," she says. "I really need to quit," she offers. "But then, I've never been one to do what's good for me, you know?"

And if she punctuates those last few words by stepping a few steps closer - a few too many, if you ask Alex and there's a thought she never imagined she'd have - well, Alex can be forgiven if she sort of forgets… well… pretty much everything.

Except the fact that she hasn't just not heard Maggie in months.

She hasn't touched her either.

"You usually stay later on Fridays," Maggie says and Alex is brought crashing back to reality cause, wait…

"You know how long I stay?"

The 'you know who I am' and the 'you've been watching me?' and the 'I bet you say that to all the girls' (still smooth, really) are left unsaid but that's only mostly due to Alex being so confused that she can't find the words.

There's also the three more steps toward her Maggie's taken and the three more steps away that Alex knows she should have taken, with should being the key fucking word.

"You've been coming here nearly a year," Maggie says. Her voice, it's a little less gravel and a lot more silk and that should sound wrong but, again, should is the key. "Four nights a week, give or take, you always pay cash and you always take your card back before I can get it." There's one more step, which is really one less than Alex thinks she can take. "I may not be a detective, but I pay attention."

Alex shuts her eyes and realizes, almost immediately, that that is her second mistake. Because now she can't see Maggie, but she can feel Maggie, right there, in her space, aggressive and demanding and direct in ways her Maggie might not have been - at least not in public - but it's so raw and she's so there and it's been so long…

But not long enough, it would seem, for there to not be one more domino to fall.

Her phone buzzes in her pocket - her new phone, the one from this world - and Alex fishes it out, so very grateful for the distraction. Right up until she's not.

Mom: It's time. She's nearly gone.

It took Eliza six weeks to convince Alex to update her contacts, to make her 'mom' instead of 'Eliza', six weeks of 'what would people say if they saw' and 'if you're going to live this lie, then you need to live it' but Alex finally caved and no, Maggie isn't reading over her shoulder, but she could.

Not that she'd understand.

"I have to go," Alex says, finding her voice again. Amazing what a little urgency can do, right? "It's a… family thing." She tucks the phone back into her pocket and turns to leave, but she stops cold when Maggie calls out.

Third mistake.

"Don't you ever wonder?" Maggie asks. "What might happen if you didn't take your card back?"

She could lie. She should lie. But she and Maggie swore they'd never do that. And maybe this isn't her Maggie, but she's all Alex's got and right now, in this moment? That's enough.

Does she ever wonder? Alex nods as she walks away. "Every single time," she says.

The 'and that's why I don't do it' is left, like so very much else, unsaid.

At least for now.