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In the control centre of the DEO, Maggie falters. Adrenaline humming, her body itching, the need to go, go, go twists at her. But all around her corridors and walkways stretch out in every direction, maze-like in the way they cross each other, and she feels suddenly dwarfed by the immensity of the organisation. She’s been here only twice before, both times in the infirmary just off of their central hub. The prisoner cells – prisoner, the thought ricochets through her mind – are another matter altogether.
Alex’s hand touches lightly at her shoulder, and Maggie whirls on her. “Where is she?” she demands.
Alex sighs, looking frustrated and conflicted, but she directs Maggie anyway, and follows behind her as Maggie jogs down one of the many hallways.
M’gann’s cell is all the way at the end, and as Maggie enters past heavy metal doors, she gasps. There’s nothing; a tiny glass box with stark white walls and the woman Maggie’s looking for who jumps up when she sees her and says, “Maggie?” in surprise.
“Are you okay?” Maggie asks desperately, rushing towards the clear cell M’gann’s being held in.
M’gann shakes her head. “I’m fine, I–”
She stops and they turn in unison to watch as Alex enters the room. “Let me in,” Maggie says before she can speak, gesturing to the cell. Alex looks like she wants to refuse, but Maggie says, “Alex, please,” and she deflates.
Alex steps in close to Maggie, taking her wrist and squeezing gently. “Okay. Okay. I’ll be outside.” She holds Maggie’s gaze until Maggie nods in acquiescence, then she hits a button on the wall and steps out of the room, metal doors groaning closed behind her.
M’gann’s cell slides open and Maggie rushes inside. “Did they hurt you? Are they treating you okay? Have they–”
“Detective Sawyer.” M’gann cuts her off, her voice at once hard, distant. She’s sat back down on her cot, and she looks far too serene for an innocent woman held prisoner in a secret government organisation. “Please, it’s okay.”
“It’s not okay! You haven’t done anything wrong!”
M’gann’s gaze drops to her lap. “You don’t know…”
“I do know,” Maggie insists, making M’gann glance up at her quickly, eyes wide. “You still don’t deserve to be locked up in here.”
M’gann sighs. “Alex told you,” she surmises.
“I was worried about you. I didn’t know where you were.”
When M’gann looks at Maggie this time, there’s an almost trembling vulnerability to her expression, as she searches Maggie’s face for the judgement, the rejection, she has surely faced from almost everyone else who’s learned her secret.
Maggie stares openly back, determined she won’t find it.
“I’m sorry for lying to you,” M’gann says, still watching Maggie with that open, worried look.
“It’s fine, M’gann, it’s fine,” Maggie insists as she moves slowly closer. M’gann seems almost…brittle, like this. Not fragile, exactly, or broken, but everything about her is tense, strained, and Maggie doesn’t want to hurt her any more than she must already be hurting. “I don’t care about that. I care that they’re holding you here illegally.”
M’gann’s openness disappears as quickly as it had come, and her mouth turns down. “Please, Maggie, just leave it be.” Her voice is more a sigh than anything else.
Maggie would, she would, she would, she wishes she could do give M’gann what she wants, but she’s not about to let her just give up. “No, come on. What they’re doing is wrong.”
M’gann turns her head to look steadily at Maggie. “If I hadn’t been in here I’d be dead.” Maggie can’t hold her gaze. It’s true, it is, and Maggie doesn’t know how to reconcile that with all the things she’s feeling. She’s not going to be grateful to the DEO for imprisoning a woman without cause, but.
One less dead.
One more alive.
That has to mean something, doesn’t it?
"So you heard…?” Maggie softens her voice, much quieter now, edged with regret.
M’gann’s chin falls against her chest and Maggie can hear the deep breath she sucks in. "Yes,” she says, “But not specifics. Not…who…?”
Maggie moves to sit beside her on the cot, exhausted from the adrenaline of earlier and having to, once again, confront the death of her friends, her community, the hatred in this world that sometimes makes Maggie feel so small. She can feel the familiar warmth of M’gann next to her, and that’s something, it’s something, and it gives her the strength to start listing off the names she’s learnt by heart, people she had known and people she hadn’t, but a community and a place of safety Maggie had felt so deeply connected to regardless.
M’gann doesn’t comment, just nods and sighs and looks sadder and sadder with each new name. They don’t say anything when Maggie finishes her list. M’gann has her eyes closed, her head bowed, and Maggie wonders if she’s praying. She wonders if it helps.
In the aftermath of the attack, a few people Maggie had spoken to had commented on how unbelievable it was, how they’d never imagined something so horrible could have happened. Neither M’gann or Maggie say anything of the sort. Maggie’s seen hate and intolerance manifest violence over and over and over again, and she knows M’gann has too. They both know too well how unsurprising, how inevitable really, the attack was, but still they had hoped, hoped, hoped they could avoid it. Hoped they could stop it.
What M’gann says instead is, “Have they decided if they’re going to reopen?”, because what else is there now except to keep going?
“Not yet,” Maggie says. “We’re still having services. Maybe once they’re through with. I can pass on your condolences, if you want.”
M’gann nods. “Thank you.”
She doesn’t say anything after that, and Maggie leaves her be for a while. Maggie had been a regular, for a long time now, but she also hadn’t been the most sociable. But M’gann, as their main bartender, as the kind and compassionate and caring woman Maggie knows her to be… M’gann had known everyone, had listened to their stories and known their lives. As much as Maggie hurts, she can hardly imagine what M’gann must be feeling. And she can’t imagine what it must be like being locked away, with little idea of what was happening or who was gone.
“I’m going to get you out of here, M’gann,” Maggie vows.
“I know you have a hero complex, Detective Sawyer, but trust me, I’m not worth the effort.”
Maggie bristles. She doesn’t have a hero complex, but… fuck, how much has M’gann figured out about her just by watching, by listening?
“Everyone’s worth something,” Maggie says. “What they’re doing to you is wrong.”
But M’gann just shakes her head again. “It’s not important.”
“It is.”
M’gann looks away. Maggie wants to yell, wants to grab her and shake her and tell her that she matters. But M’gann just looks tired, and Maggie aches for her, wishes there was a way she could make this better for everyone.
“I left people behind to save myself too, you know,” Maggie says.
M’gann rolls her eyes. “Our situations are hardly comparable.”
“I know.” Maggie sighs. “It’s just…they’re not completely different either.”
“You were the persecuted, Maggie.” M’gann takes a deep breath, and with shame so sharp in her voice, “I was the persecutor.”
“You didn’t have a choice,” Maggie argues.
“There’s always a choice.”
There is so much bitterness within M’gann; so much self-hatred and defeat, now, too. Maggie has no idea how to fight it, to make M’gann want again.
Maggie twists so that their knees touch. M’gann doesn’t move away, and she takes that as a good sign. “Make a choice then,” she insists. “Choose to live, choose to use the chance you’ve been given helping people, making this world a better place. There’s no making amends stuck in here.”
“What makes you think I’m any good out there?” There’s just the hint of a smile playing at M’gann’s mouth, and Maggie latches onto that.
“You don’t fool me, you know? I’ve known you a long time. I’ve seen how much you care. I’ve seen how you help people at the bar, all those lives you’ve changed, the lives you’ve saved. You’re quiet about it, I’ll give you that, but I’m a damn good detective.” Maggie knocks their knees together and M’gann does smile then, tiny and fragile but there. “And…we’re going to need you. Now more than ever.”
M’gann sighs. “It’s not that simple, Maggie.”
“I know that. But you can choose not to give up. You can choose to fight.”
M’gann looks at Maggie. It’s the first time Maggie’s really had the chance to observe her so close outside the dim light of the bar, and she looks so terribly weary. “I’ve been fighting for more than three hundred years,” M’gann says. “Maybe…” She sighs, looking down at her lap again. “Maybe it’s about time I stopped.”
“M’gann…”
In a voice so quiet Maggie can barely hear her, she says, “I keep surviving and I don’t know why.”
Maggie sighs. She doesn’t get it, not really. She hadn’t run thousands of miles across the stars; she hadn’t watched millions of bodies burning. But she had endured her parents’ rejection, their betrayal. She had endured eighteen years in a town that despised everything that she was, and she had eventually got out; cracked but not broken, and strong, strong, strong enough to persevere even when the rest of the world wasn’t as perfect as she had envisioned it to be. Maggie had survived where not everyone in her same situation had. It hadn’t always been pretty, she hadn’t always been kind, but, somehow, she’s here still. And, despite everything, M’gann is too.
“Sometimes it’s all we can do,” she answers after a minute. Maggie’s not much of a hugger, and M’gann hardly seems the type either, but she has missed her friend. And maybe there is some common understanding to their story, maybe they might get each other a little bit more than most. And a shared tragedy is a shared tragedy, and M’gann is the only person she knows who might recognise the way devastation nestles so deeply in Maggie’s chest that she can’t root it out.
She reaches for M’gann’s hand, slowly so as not to startle her, and threads their fingers together. M’gann glances down at the contact for a moment, then squeezes Maggie’s hand in return. They don’t cry, or look at each other, or talk anymore. They sit side-by-side in M’gann’s appallingly tiny cell watching the stark white walls, and take comfort in the tight press of their palms together and the quiet solidarity of just one other person in this world who, maybe, gets it too.