"Skull cage like a prison."
The fret of concentration between two delicate, expressive brows, paired with the faint scrunch at the bridge of her nose, speak volumes: Cosima is working. Engrossed. So much so that she's almost unaware of the dulled voices around her (Sarah, ordering a hovering Alison and a nosy Felix out into the apartment hall: 'Quiet, she's just weird.').
Near-quiet floods the space, the fixed, gentle click-click-click-click of her fingers along the keyboard and the pulse-pulse-pulse-pulse of her heart distant music on the moldering cement walls.
"My mind's lost with nightmares streaming, waking up kicking and screaming."
Thoughts. All she can hear are thoughts, whispering and elusive, a thousand choruses, her pulse so loud and distracting above it all. Twirling double helices dance before hazed eyes clouded with fatigue, with weariness. The wings of the lines on her lids do nothing to help her fly. 'I'm sick, Delphine.'
The jerk of her silhouette cuts a shadow on the wall, slicing the setting sun's light with the sharp slash of her shock. Up come her glasses, victim to the fluttering blink of lashes, banishing sleep from her senses. Swallowing past the cough fighting at her throat, her fingers return to their work, click-click-click-click in the quiet, still quiet, of the apartment.
"My mind's lost in bleak visions; I've tried to escape, but keep sinking."
Hours since the room has gone dark. The blur of figures float around the edges of her vision, glasses of water placed on the table beside her hand and gentle nudges of her shoulder attempting to coax her up from her computer. Cosima doesn't budge, doesn't cough, doesn't so much as blink, the white light of her computer screen paling her face.
'I'm sick, Delphine.' No more chances, no more time for experimenting and learning and growing. No help to be had but what she can give herself, and Sarah, and Alison, and how ever many more of them there were. Click-click-click-click. The future, like the room, is dark each time Cosima looks to it, so tonight, she chooses not to, focusing on the whisper-song of her thoughts as it hovers in the foreground, looming and unwanted.
"I think I'm still human."
The slide of her glasses down her nose to hit the keyboard of her laptop is, in the end, what jars her concentration; she jumps, gasping a breath on impulse and realising she'd been holding in the air. Cosima scrambles back to reality, pushing her glasses back up her nose and giving them a little straighten, ordering, preparing.
No matter how hard she tries, she can't coax her focus back. A small, frustrated sigh slides past her lips, and Cosima drags a hand through the thick ropes of her dreadlocks in a rare, selfish display of stress. A moment to closer her eyes, to realign her focus, to ensure she doesn't cough, and then she presses on. Click-click-click-click.
"But I think I'm dying here."
She coughs before she can stop herself: a harsh, gasping sound, rattling from behind restrained for so long. The movement of her hand to her lips comes too late, and several, bright drops of crimson blood - her blood - slide down the glowing display of her screen as she stares, dumbstruck, at the smears they leave in their wakes.
Blindly, she reaches for a Kleenex, knocking over one of the forgotten glasses of water and flinching as the near-melted ice cubes skitter across the floor, jumbling her scattered mind all the more. Muttering a breath of California curses through another series of coughs, she forces herself up, wobbling on tired legs, to walk to the kitchen and retrieve more towels. She's just finished mopping up the blood and water - which is thicker, she'd like some more - when the pitter-pitter-patter-patter of footsteps reach her ears.
"Underneath this skin, there's a human."
It's Sarah, of course it is. One of them's just as bad as the other, these days, with how much they aren't sleeping (in the back of her mind, to keep from letting a laugh cause another cough, she snickers). She's speaking her name, quiet and concerned.
Cosima shakes her head. Resists the urge to grit her teeth and lifts her head with a smile in place instead. Each just as bad as the other; Sarah knows not to push. The next morning, when Sarah pads into the living room from another near-sleepless night, Cos is sprawled across the couch, glasses tilted on her nose and sweater rumpled, but still with one hand on the keyboard.
"After everything, I'm still human."