A shrill beeping noise penetrated Maggie's dream, manifesting itself as the bell in her high school based nightmare. Finally realising she was in her girlfriend's bed and not an English class she contemplated opening her eyes but just as she did she felt Alex shift in the bed and a second later the offending phone stopped making noise. A cold draft swept over her as Alex got out of the bed so she wriggled and pulled the covers back over herself, still refusing to open her eyes and give up on getting back to sleep.
She listened to Alex as she scrambled down the steps to her living area.
After a couple of minutes of complete silence Maggie sat up to see where Alex had gone. She could just about make out Alex in the kitchen at the opposite end of the apartment, the phone in her hands the only source of light as she leant against the kitchen counter.
"Is everything okay?" Maggie asked as she approached Alex, pulling out a stool to sit next to her at the counter.
Alex didn't respond immediately, too focused on her phone to notice her surroundings. Maggie leaned in closer to watch the images on Alex's phone. It appeared to be security footage from the DEO medical bay, two individuals were huddled around Kara who was sat on the edge of her bed.
"What's going on?"
Alex continued to gaze at the phone screen.
"Alex?" Maggie moved to take the phone out of Alex's grip in order to get her attention. The move startled Alex who then clumsily dropped the phone on the counter.
"Is Kara okay?" Maggie asked Alex who was now staring at her with wide eyes.
"She's being sick."
"Is that what that alarm was?"
"Kind of. That was notifying me that Kara had moved from the sunbed."
Maggie raised her eyebrow but Alex couldn't see it, having already turned back to watch the footage on her phone. Even if the screen of the phone was small it was still high-quality footage of J'onn helping Kara to lie back in bed whilst a medic cleaned up her sick and found a clean bowl.
"I need to go and see her."
"Alex…"
Alex got up to start to get ready to go into the DEO but Maggie reached out for her arm, stopping her in her tracks.
"She's okay, look," Maggie pointed, "She's back in bed, they will call you if there was anything they couldn't handle."
Alex didn't take her eyes off the screen, watching J'onn rearrange Kara's blanket as Kara struggled to get comfortable.
"Please come back to bed."
Alex nodded but didn't take her eyes off her phone screen as Maggie led her back up the steps to her bed.
Alex let Maggie hold her but as soon as Maggie was snoring softly she reached back for her phone from her night stand and checked in on Kara who now appeared to be asleep. J'onn had gone back to his work at the nearby table and the medic was running the nightly checks.
Alex sighed and put her phone back on the table and tried to get back to sleep.
"So, when will I be able to stop having these infusions?" Kara asked as Alex disconnected her IV.
"Hopefully tomorrow morning will be your last one," Alex flushed the cannula, "I'm going to take some blood from you throughout the day just to make sure but the fact that your cells are storing solar energy means that you're probably in the clear."
Kara watched her sister dispose of the infusion before washing her hands and pulling on another set of gloves. She then approached Kara with a needle. Kara held her breath as the needle approached her skin. She didn't know if she was relieved or disappointed when the needle pierced her skin and Alex began to draw the blood from her arm.
As Alex drew the second bottle of her blood Kara felt her vision begin to blur and everything became silent. Alex swapped for the final bottle and Kara felt more and more dizzy, she let her eyes shut and her head fall backwards onto the bed.
When she opened her eyes again, Alex was looming over her, eyes boring into her both confused and concerned. Kara blinked rapidly, trying to bring her vision back into focus until suddenly she could see Alex's whole skeleton. She closed her eyes and shook her head violently until her ears were ringing and then sat up and tried to swing her legs off the bed.
"Kara? What's happening?" Alex tried to get her to lie back down on the bed.
"Sick."
No further explanation was needed, that one word had Alex running for a bowl. She got back and had it in position just in time to catch the contents of Kara's stomach. When her stomach seemed to have settled she pushed the bowl away. The room around her was still spinning and she again felt herself falling back onto the bed, eyes falling closed against her will.
"Kara?" Alex's voice rattled around her head.
"Kara?"
"Shhh."
"Is it your hearing?"
"No, x-ray vision, but it's giving me a headache."
"I don't remember them ever being so bad that you passed out." Alex was now shining her pen torch into Kara's eyes, the bright light blinded her and she pushed her sister away gently.
"I didn't pass out."
"You passed out twice."
Kara tried to glare at Alex but her vision distorted again and then turned into x-ray, sending another shooting pain through her head.
"I'm just going to check your vitals," Alex told her as she turned on the monitor and then wrapped a blood pressure cuff around Kara's arm and placed a probe on one of her fingers.
"I'm fine, really. It just took me by surprise."
"Do you want your glasses?"
"Actually, yeah, please."
"I would expect all of your powers to begin to reappear soon, your cells are currently at 88% solar radiation," Alex told her as she handed Kara her glasses and the cuff on Kara's arm deflated, triggering an alarm on the monitor above her head.
"What now?" Kara groaned as she pushed the glasses up her nose.
"Your blood pressure is just a little bit low, I'm not really surprised, you've barely eaten and you are not really drinking either."
"Because everything makes me feel sick."
"I think it's just a side effect of the medication, it should get better once the final dose has worked its way out of your system." Alex stroked her sister's face, "But for now I think I might give you some IV fluids, just to make sure."
Kara sat forward on the bed and took some deep breaths, fidgeting with the glasses on her face. When Alex approached her with a bag of fluids she held out her arm for her sister to attach them to the cannula. Alex took advantage of Kara's new-found compliance.
"Can I examine your leg?"
Kara nodded her permission and so Alex gently removed the dressing from her thigh. Kara watched her expression closely for any signs of a problem but Alex's face remained neutral as she changed her gloves.
Kara winced as Alex began to clean the wound but leant forward to get a better look at it for herself.
"It's looking so much better," Alex told her as she began to apply a new dressing, "It's finally healing again. Can I check your hip as well?"
Again, Kara nodded, lifting her top and lowering the waistband on her shorts so that Alex could remove the dressing. The kryptonite wounds were almost completely healed, barely more than scratches on the surface of her skin.
"I don't think I even need to put a dressing back on this," Alex told her before helping Kara to readjust her pyjamas.
Alex sighed as she headed back to the medical bay. She had left Kara dozing under the sunlamps but she needed to talk to her to try to start to understand what she had been going through in the last few months.
She had had plenty of time to think about things sat at Kara's bedside recently, about everything that had gone wrong between them. She had argued with Kara when she had suggested that she move to Metropolis with Clark, she had accused her of ignoring her in favour of Clark and then she had gone and done the same thing when she had met Maggie. Alex didn't feel guilty for her relationship with Maggie but maybe she hadn't found the right balance yet.
In hindsight, Kara had clearly been struggling for a while, even before she lost her job at CatCo. The rift created between Kara and her friends when she found out about Guardian had only got worse as James and Winn had continued to play superhero without her. Missed sisters' nights, game nights and an Earth birthday had all added to the distance between Kara and her support system. In the end none of them had noticed that she had moved out of her loft and into that crappy high-rise apartment.
Maybe she should have let Kara move away, she might not have felt so alone and isolated with Clark in Metropolis. Then they might never have found her father and he might never have betrayed them. Alex felt like that had been the real turning point in their relationship, the point of no return.
She had been working on a speech in her head, a segue into a conversation about everything, but when she entered the medical bay she found Kara perched on the edge of her bed, her legs dangling, feet not quite reaching the floor. A tech was nervously standing at her side.
"Are you alright?"'
"I need to get up. That stupid fluid has gone right through me." Kara pointed at the nearly empty bag of fluid hanging from the IV stand.
"Just give me a second to disconnect that and then you can walk with me," Alex told her, much to the visible relief of the tech, before going to wash her hands.
"Okay, are you ready?" She took her place at Kara's side.
Kara nodded then shuffled forward so her feet were on the ground. Alex put her arm around her sister and stayed close as Kara stood up, tentatively putting some weight on her injured leg. She gritted her teeth against the initial pain but it got better with every step until she was safely in the bathroom.
Two minutes later, Kara called her name and Alex opened the door to find Kara washing her hands at the sink.
"Do you want to try walking further?" Alex asked as Kara dried her hands.
"Yeah," Kara linked Alex's arm and let her lead her back out into the medical bay. Alex hesitated as she reached out for the doors that led onto the back corridor, searching for any stray agents, but it was empty so she held the door open for Kara to limp through.
"Let's try to make it to the window," Alex suggested and started down the corridor. Kara reached out for the wall with her free arm, using it to assist her but gradually she moved away so that Alex was her only support.
They eventually made it to the window at the end of the corridor which looked out over the south of National City. Alex let go of Kara and let her head rest on the cool window pane. The cold glass did little to sooth the headache that was brewing.
"What's wrong?" Kara's voice broke through the haze.
"I'm tired," Alex admitted.
"I thought that you might have had a better night's sleep at your apartment."
"It helped but I wasted a lot of the night worrying about you."
"You don't have to worry about me."
"Kara, I will always worry about you, especially when I leave you in the medical bay, barely recovered from some random alien parasite," Alex moved away from the window, shrugging off her own bout of nausea.
"Alex..."
"Kara, I don't know what I would do if I actually lost you."
"You have Maggie."
"Kara, please, it's not the same. Why on Earth did you take that kryptonite?"
Alex watched her sister squirm. In that second, she was angry and she wanted to talk even though she was making Kara uncomfortable.
"I didn't mean to."
Alex laughed, "So the door to the biometrically sealed cabinet just fell off and the kryptonite just walked right out and into your pockets." Alex knew she sounded ridiculous and a little bit like her mother.
"I didn't want to hurt anyone, I didn't have control over my stupid powers, I was going to kill someone."
"So, you thought you'd kill yourself instead?" Alex furiously wiped the tears from her eyes as she watched Kara hold back onto the wall for support.
"That's not what I was doing."
"Then please enlighten me Kara, because that's all I have been able to think about since I brought you back from the desert completely unconscious only to find out that it was you who took the kryptonite that almost killed you."
Alex gave up wiping away her tears and let them run freely down her cheeks.
"I kept the bits of kryptonite in their lead containers. I fell out of the sky because those stupid worms chose the moment I was in the air to drain away all the solar energy in my cells," Kara was shouting now and Alex found herself speechless, not just because Kara was yelling at her, but because her eyes were glowing red, heat vision building up.
"Fuck!" Both sisters swore in unison.
Alex's instinct was to get out of the way but Kara was sinking to the floor, her hands firmly against her ears. She ran to catch her falling sister, easing her gently to the ground and pulling her tightly into her chest.
Kara was shaking violently, hands still clasped to her ears.
"It's going to be alright, just take deep breaths."
Kara was rocking herself now, trying to calm herself down but Alex could feel the heat from her eyes.
"Is it your hearing as well?"
Kara nodded furiously against her chest as Alex checked the corridor but no one was in sight.
Suddenly Kara was pushing her away, overbalancing her and sending her sprawling to the floor. She watched helplessly as Kara took off down the corridor towards the service elevator in clumsy bursts of superspeed, taking a chunk out of the wall as she went. Finally, she fell completely, slamming into a storage cage and sending it flying into the elevator doors.
"Kara?" Alex stumbled to her feet as the metal cage hit the metal doors.
"Stay back."
Alex ignored her and made her way over to her sister.
"Please, just give me a minute. I don't want to hurt you." Kara tried to crawl further away to try to maintain the distance she had created between Alex and herself.
Alex continued to ignore Kara and threw herself on the floor and pulled her back tightly into her chest, rocking her gently, fighting Kara's efforts to get out of her grip.
Kara's sobs settled and her breathing evened out but Alex stayed on the floor with her, not daring to let go of her sister until the heat behind her eyes finally settled.