Sometimes, Myka wakes with the salty remains of tears beneath her eyes and the choking remains of horror around her heart. Sometimes, she wakes with the instant, heavy clarity of the knowledge that Helena is dead. Once in a while, she even remembers why she feels this way. Once in a while, she even forgets that she shouldn't feel this way.

She'll wake with her feet hanging off the bed, sheets twisted around her thighs and torso. She won't reach out to the other side of the bed because if Helena is gone, where is the point in reaching? She'll be covered in sweat but shivering, and she'll feel numb inside and bruised outside.

"Myka?"

Helena's hand will finds her shoulder and she won't be able to move, sure that this reality, the one where everything seems too perfect to be real even on the worst days, will shatter around her and she won't be able to pick up the pieces.

But Helena always knows. Helena doesn't know why, or even what most times, but she always knows and she always talks, her words, her voice, her scent sinking into Myka's skin slowly until Myka knows that they're alive. And Myka tells her of blue-tinged flames and being separated, of not finding Walter Sykes's bomb in time, of a Warehouse turned to dust and charcoal in a matter of seconds, and worst of all of Helena being gone. Helena kisses her and strokes her hair and Myka buries her face in Helena's chest and breathes in through her nose, and they fall asleep to Helena's theories of parallel universes and alternate timelines. And in the morning, they wake and find with some surprise, though neither voices it, that the world still exists just as it always has, just as it ought to be.