Note: Possible spoilers for the end of Season 2 if you are super spoiler-wary.
Up at Night
She has never been a particularly sound sleeper, never been one for eight hours of peace. Lately though, she finds herself tracing cracks in the ceiling for hours on end, listening to the rasping breath of her sister who lies just fingertips away.
This is what wakes her up at night: Someday, she will get her hands on the complete list of her sisters, a list of every baby girl born into this contrived paradigm. She will have to set out to find them, spread out across the world, living their lives in blissful ignorance. She will have to touch each of them, and she will have to explain.
How will she tell a woman she's only just met that she is part of an illegal cloning trial? That she has no roots? How do you prove to her she is still human, still whole, still worthy?
How will she tell them of the war she waged? Of the sacrifices their sisters gave? How will she convey the bloody chaos that reigned, overturning their lives in the span of a year that felt like a lifetime?
How will she explain to them the ticking time bomb planted in their genes? How will she even start the conversation? You see, your lungs...
How will she convey the complexity of a monitor? How will she help them decide if it was lies or love or misunderstanding?
How will she explain sisters who seem like monsters, one with a heart on her sleeve and the soul of a child, and one deeply broken?
How will she explain to them their biological imperative? How can she explain to these women, these strangers, that they are family? You don't know me, but you are my flesh and blood and I am yours, and this is the most important thing you will ever know. This matters - for a time, it was all that mattered.
This is what wakes her up at night, the weight of the unanswerable questions, the weight of the women who are part of a war of which they are unaware. Naive and innocent, they rest on her shoulders. She feels each one of them under her skin and it makes her want to run.
That is was wakes her up at night. But what keeps her awake is something separate, different, something she refuses to say, even in the privacy of the silence of the night. As questions flow though her mind, she stops each one short, cleaving that phrase from the end.
How will she face this responsibility, how will she bear this weight without Cosima? How will she do this if Cosima is gone? How will she find these women and explain to them the depth of that loss? How will she explain Cosima to the sisters who may never know her? How will she even start?
I know how to look at you and see flesh and blood and family, I know how to love you, all because of her. She was my teacher in all of this, she was the one who taught me to embrace this, to be a sister.