"I'm sick, Delphine."

Three words. The grenade that starts the war, really starts it, renders all battles up to this point mere child's play.

You feel the impact in your whole body, a marrow deep armageddon, because you do not have to ask for clarification. You know what sort of sick she means; your brain has turned instantly into a rapid slideshow, clicking through memories of MRIs and PET scans, biopsies and thoracentesis, ever elevating CRP and ESR levels. In the space of two seconds, you mentally skim through the entire medical file of 323B01 (Jennifer).

You remember. And you know.

But Cosima is looking at you, her eyes filled with tears and terror, lower lip trembling stubbornly. She's looking at you like she's waiting for permission to break down, or maybe just a reassurance that you will help her pick up the pieces.

So you wrap her in your arms and hold on for dear life. Cosima sinks into it immediately, all distance between the two of you obliterated. This, holding her, her hands involuntarily fisting the back of your shirt like she wants to be even closer...it's more than you dared to hope for. But it's the definition of a hollow victory.

Her breath is hitching and trembling against your ear, and you rub your hand in soothing circles across her back, letting her cry. You're grateful for your position because she can't see your face, buried against her shoulder, your eyes squeezed so tightly shut it feels like you're battling back blood rather than tears.

Love. Just a few hours ago, you clawed the word back, wisely stopping yourself from to giving voice to that feeling far too soon, at a time when Cosima wasn't inclined to trust it. So you tucked it under your tongue, saving it for another day, a better day, but now it's throbbing like an ulcer, begging to be screamed, or maybe sobbed.

You love her, you love her, you love her. She is not a loss you can bear.

She's crying harder now, and you're precariously close to joining her, the tears rising insistently up the column of your throat. But you force them back, press curled lips against her shoulder until the threat recedes.

You will not cry in front of her. Once you start, you aren't confident you'll be able to stop, because you'll be crying like you already know how this ends.

But you won't accept that ending. Not for her.

You press your lips to Cosima's temple. You hold her a little tighter. You ready yourself for this fight.

Onscreen, Jennifer Fitzsimmons, looking carefree and deceptively healthy, is cheerfully giving an introduction to her video journals. Cosima's eyes are glued to the screen, and you're standing behind her, feeling like you've done something awful, that it's about to blow everything apart.

And yet, even now, with guilt from a lie by ommision brewing in your gut...you want to keep it from her. You're trying like hell to protect Cosima from something she can't be protected from, something inevitable, and that makes you the worst kind of selfish.

What Cosima wants right now is control, and knowledge, and you've been keeping that from her because you so desperately need to believe it doesn't matter. That Jennifer's death is not a prophecy for Cosima's, that somehow the two will have nothing to do with each other, that things will be different this time simply because you want it badly enough.

Finally, Jennifer gets around to mentioning the polyps on her lungs, and the reason for the videos, and the DYAD's possession of them becomes clear. Cosima turns around, her eyes finding yours, cautious but not yet worried.

(Because she trusts you. Because she assumes you would have told her if this was something to worry about. This realization pries off another sliver of your heart.)

"Is she okay?" Cosima asks, Jennifer's face looming on the screen behind her.

So then, at last, you have to say it, a single word fired from a gun in your chest: it's pointed outward, aimed at Cosima, but it still has to rip painfully through your own muscles and bones to get out.

"No."

"How could you possibly think it's okay for you to be here?"

Here is Felix's loft, meant to be a very short term crash pad while Cosima considered the DYAD offer and decided if she needed a more permanent residence. But since Felix absconded town along with Sarah and Kira, the two of you have settled in.

You've been waiting here for the three hours since Cosima grabbed Jennifer's DVDs and stormed out, making it painfully clear you shouldn't follow.

"Please." You look at her with wide, needy eyes, the eyes of a beggar. "Please give me a chance to explain."

"There's nothing to explain. You knew about her, this whole time, and you didn't tell me!" She's fuming, practically hurling the words, but you still catch the fear clinging to each syllable.

"I'm sorry." Your voice is small, the words feeble.

"You're kind of always sorry," she hisses coldly. "Because you're kind of always lying."

She slams a thin manilla folder down on the counter. "Leekie came to see me, to bring me Jennifer's medical file." Her face twists. "And he said my lymphocyte count is increasing more rapidly than he'd like, just within the last two weeks. I asked how he knew. He showed me a comparison between my blood sample they took from me GP, and the one you gave him a few days ago!"

Cosima fixes you with a hard glare that could easily misconstrued as contempt, but you see it's more wounded than anything else, her eyes bruised beneath the venom.

Throat tight, you protest, "They have two years' worth of research on this, Cosima! Even you know the DYAD is your best chance at a cure, that's why you took their offer. But I didn't know how long it would take you to make a decision, and it couldn't wait - "

"I didn't know I was such a ticking time bomb, did I? I didn't know you had already watched a girl die from this, that you knew exactly what's going to happen to me - "

"That is not going to happen to you," you retort heatedly, the fight rising in your throat on this point more than any other.

It's not a point Cosima wants to argue, but she forcefully slides open the loft door and screams, "Get out!" Just like that it's déjà vu, and you're thrown back to the apartment in Minnesota, the first time you nearly lost her.

"No," you refuse firmly, folding yourself against the corner of the couch.

Cosima narrows her eyes, voice suddenly drained of volume but still pulsing with the sting of betrayal. "I told you. I told you not to send the samples to DYAD. That I wanted to study it myself. And you...you didn't even try to fight me."

"Would fighting you have worked?" Without giving her a chance to answer, you add, "And you are doing the studies yourself. At the DYAD! We came to the same conclusion."

"But you didn't know what I'd decide!" Frustrated, she presses the heels of her hands over her eyes. "You just figured what I want doesn't matter. You filter what I get to know and not know, you don't take my decisions into account...you're just like them, Delphine. I'm a fucking experiment to you. Patented property."

The accusation lands like a punch to the gut, but you tighten your jaw and suffer the blow. This time you won't let her hurt you into walking out.

"You're wrong." The words are quiet, barely above a whisper; it's the only way to keep your voice steady.

Closing her eyes, Cosima practically falls back against the still open loft door, exhausted. Her voice snagging, she says, "Then tell me why."

You don't have it in you to hold this back a second time. "Because I love you." It lands between you. Her eyes widen. "If you believe anything I ever say to you, believe that."

You take a moment, let that settle. Cosima's eyes fill with tears, and they don't move from yours. She doesn't say it back, isn't ready to give you that yet, but you can see her believing you. Right now that's enough.

"I gave the sample to Leekie because the DYAD has the most resources and information to find a cure. And I...I need there to be a cure." Your voice falters for the first time, and Cosima takes a few tentative steps closer, her face softening the slightest bit. "I am sorry I lied to you. But I'm not sorry I gave them your sample...right now, the most important thing is saving your life."

There's a long, loaded silence, during which Cosima's eyes never leave yours. Finally, she asks faintly, "And Jennifer?" You wonder if she realizes she flinches every time she says the name.

Still on the couch, you curl in on yourself just a little. "That I'm only sorry for. But...when you told me you are sick...I saw her face. Your face, Cosima, it's your face."

It does something to you, finally saying that out loud, and all at once words are tumbling out, frantic and wet with tears you're fiercely reminding yourself to hold back. "I see it all the time. Every time I think about you being sick, I see her face after she died. She had lost her hair, she had been so sick, there was nothing to, to, to differentiate. To distinguish. It could be your face, that I kept seeing. And I knew when you found out about her...you'd start seeing her, too. I couldn't be the person to do that to you. I didn't know how."

You have to look away, now, or else you really are going to lose it. You close your eyes and wait, not sure if forgiveness or dismissal is more likely. Then the weight of the couch shifts beside you, cool fingers slide tentatively between yours, and finally her forehead rests against your shoulder.

"I want...I need you to come with me. To see the body," she whispers in a tight, pained tone. "Leekie offered to take me today, but. I wanted to wait for you."

"Alright. Of course."

"Thanks."

You stay like that for awhile, slumped on the couch, drained and empty and exhausted, but leeching comfort from the warm weight of her against your side. You think to yourself that Cosima is so solid, so present, when really what you mean is alive.

"I want to promise you something," you whisper eventually, when you've both been silent long enough for the fight's intensity to fade.

"What?," she murmurs almost sleepily.

"I want to promise you that we're going to save you. You and I, we will find the cure. I won't have you end up like her."

Cosima tilts her head back to give you a thin smile that doesn't reach her eyes. "That may not be a promise you can keep."

"It is. I will."

Those next few days, of delving into Jennifer's life and death, obsessing over old, failed research, are rough, but eventually the two of you settle into something easier.

You work together in the new lab, as in sync and compatible in a work environment as you are outside of it, and though the urgency never goes away, it's occasionally possible to forget the work is literally life or death for Cosima. She gets the leather couch she wanted, and it gets a lot of use during the slow hours. When Sarah, Felix and Kira come back, the two of you move into a new apartment.

But, slowly but not slow enough, Cosima gets sicker. At first it just means fewer lab hours, and more frequent breathing treatments. Eventually, she needs an oxygen tank and a cannula for anything more intensive than sleeping. You'd wanted to put off the more experimental treatments for as long as possible, but it's an inevitability that comes, and after a few weeks of the first one you're holding a sobbing, gasping Cosima in the floor of the bathroom, the hacked remnants of her dreads surrounding you on the tile.

When she's too sick to be an outpatient anymore, Cosima's moved into a permanent room at the hospital connecting to the DYAD, and your apartment becomes an abandoned ghost town. You take up residence in Cosima's room or, more often, the lab, where the leather couch is now only used for fitful, shallow bursts of sleep, never more than a few hours at a time.

A permanent, bullet of a headache takes up residence between your eyes, and the constant, too bright light of the hospital or lab only aggravates it. Leekie starts talking about possibilities "we" need to prepare for. You learn how to tune out his voice. You keep emailing Cosima lab results and reports, agreeing with her request to stay involved, stay active. You have three separate panic attacks when you're kept away from the lab for too long, and once even pass out after forgetting to eat for a day and a half.

Then, one day in the lab, your cell phone rings, provoking the now instinctual jerk of terror and panic in your chest. But it's Cosima's number, Cosima's voice, now all strained, halting syllables and long pauses for gathering breath.

"I got it, Delphine. I...I figured it out."

Forty minutes later, you're sitting beside her on the hospital bed, her laptop straddled between both your laps, and Cosima is smiling at you, proud and expectant, having just walked you through her epiphany, a thirty minute explanation that she'd struggled through, more talking than she'd done in weeks.

She's waiting for you to say something.

"But, it's...it isn't..."

"I know," she whispers. "It's preventative."

You shake your head, as though rejecting the information. Cosima's been poring over your data, every thread you've been following, every theory posed. And finally, finally, she's molded it into an answer. A solution. This is the culmination of the past year's work.

But it won't help her.

"Alison, Sarah...Kira..." Cosima smiles, the first genuine smile you've seen from her in months. "They won't get sick."

"But..." Your whole body is trembling. You want to scream until the heart monitors shatter, until your lungs tear into pieces, until they're as useless as hers. The unfairness of it all roars in your chest like a monster, but when you open your mouth to speak, it's with the fragile, trembling voice of a little girl. "But what about you?"

Cosima falls back on the pillow. There's something in her face that scares the hell out of you: something like peace. Or maybe just resignation. "This is...more important. There's only...one of me." She takes your hand, squeezes sympathetically. Like you're the one who's sick. "I've known for...awhile...that a cure was...less likely. Didn't you?"

"No." You pull away and stand up. "No, I didn't. I don't. Just because there's a preventative measure doesn't mean we stop looking for a cure. I'm still looking. We'll develop a new treatment."

"Delphine - "

"I'll call Leekie, tell him to come see you. He can work on developing the vaccine for the others. I'm going to look at your latest biopsies, come up with another drug cocktail - "

"Delphine."

You're backing toward the door, because you know what she's going to say and you won't let her.

Cosima is tired of treatments. She is tired of the hospital, tired of getting sicker with every attempt to help. She is tired of the fight. And now that she has quite probably saved the others, she can let herself give up.

But you can't. You don't have it in you to let her go.

A month later, when Alison and Sarah, with Kira in tow, arrive at the DYAD for their third and, hopefully, final round of vaccination shots, they find you destroying a section of your lab.

"Oh, my God!" Alison nearly jumps out of her skin as a tray of empty beakers smashes against a wall a good eight feet away from her.

Sarah steps instinctually in front of Kira, her body instantly tense. "Ah. Delphine? What's happened?"

You clench your fists against your scalp and close your eyes, because it hurts to look at them, their healthy, glowing faces and light in their eyes. They're nothing now but harsh, unflattering contrasts to Cosima, and it makes you physically sick.

"Leekie," you grit out, angry words tripping over each other. "Leekie, he's a liar, and a fraud, he isn't helping anyone..."

Alison and Sarah exchange alarmed looks. "Does that mean...the vaccines...?"

"The vaccines are fine," you retort, dripping bitterness.

"Listen," Sarah says, tone segueing instantly into harsh impatience. "We've made a decision to trust what you all do here, because Cosima says it's necessary if we wanna stay healthy...but if Leekie's done something, we need to know."

"Leekie hasn't done anything," comes a soft, wrecked voice from behind them. Everyone swivels at once to see Cosima wheeling herself through the doorway. Kira instantly tucks herself against her mother's side, averting her eyes from Cosima's bald, diminished form, the cannula tubes in her nose. Cosima looks past the others to meet your eyes. "Other than finally admit...the truth."

You turn away, abruptly, crossing the lab and bending over a random microscope, peering intensely at whatever blood slide was waiting, like this is all a game of hide and seek, and if you only look long enough, something will show itself.

You can't quite block out the sound of conversation from across the lab, though you're trying not to register the words.

"...he said there's nothing else they can...do for me."

"Oh, God."

"I've known...for awhile, I think."

"Cos..."

"Not now, okay?" There's a tremulous note in her voice that strikes you somewhere in the chest, and you can't help but glance over. Sarah's frozen halfway between Kira and Cosima, the look on Cosima's face clearly begging her to hold off on whatever comfort was about to be offered. She looks over Sarah's shoulder at you, then asks, "Could you guys...give us a minute? Leekie's in...his office, he's got the shots."

"Sure, 'course." Sarah takes Kira's hand, and squeezes Cosima on the shoulder on her way out. "We'll call, okay? Come by soon."

Alison bends down and kisses Cosima on the cheek, says something you can't hear, and they leave. Your veins are pulsing with panic, and you return to the microscope just to have something to do.

When Cosima speaks again, her voice is much closer. "You kind of...fucked up my lab."

"I didn't break anything I've been using," you tell her without looking up. Your voice sounds like it's coming from underwater.

"Hey. Look at me."

Slowly, painstakingly you do, eyes already flared challengingly, an argument flying off the tip of your tongue before she can speak. "Leekie doesn't know what he's talking about. He only cares about the experiment, doesn't want to use resources for only you...that doesn't mean it's impossible."

Cosima doesn't say anything, just looks up at you with big, sunken eyes. You're glad for her glasses; these days, it's the only thing distinguishing her from your mental image of Jennifer Fitzsimmon's dead body. She waits.

"I'm not stopping," you tell her churlishly, never mind that you sound about eight years old, a petulant, stubborn child refusing to obey. "I won't listen to him."

"Okay," she agrees softly. "But for a second...could you listen to me?"

You say nothing, and she takes that for agreement.

"Delphine, I...I want to go home. And I want you...with me. Not in the lab. I just...want to go home with you. Please." Her voice unspools. "Please, Delphine. I can't...be here anymore. Come home with me. Please. Please."

She's crying a little, looking so small and broken in her wheelchair, and this should be your cue to go to her, get down on your knees and pull her into your arms, but you can't make yourself move. There is a surreal sort of awfulness to this moment, like it can't possibly be happening, and if you don't give in and participate in it, it won't be.

But then Cosima sucks in a ragged, sharp breath so she can say without pause, "I want you with me when it happens," and everything inside of you caves in.

You sit down, hard, right in the middle of the lab, and by the time you hit the floor you're already crying. It's that fast, your whole body immediately racked with sobs, slicing through you like hot blades. It's the kind of crying no adult should be capable of, gulping baby sobs, like messy, high pitched howls.

It takes a few moments, but then you feel her beside you, and she sets the oxygen tank aside before wrapping you up in her arms. You burrow your face into the folds of her hospital gown, and she feels so fragile beneath your hands. You realize how long it's been since you held her, since you gave yourself enough time away from the lab to do it, and that only makes you cry harder. It only makes you need her more.

The tears are a long time coming, so you stay there crying against her until it literally exhausts you, until your muscles are aching with effort. Cosima's stroking your hair, with such infinite tenderness is shreds you fresh, and her face is wet with tears, too.

Finally, she puts a hand on your cheek and makes you look at her through bloodshot eyes, swollen into slits. "Hey..." Her forehead rests against yours. "I'm letting...you off the hook. Of your promise. It's okay."

Your face crumples, and, impossibly, more tears slip out, but finally, you nod. "We can go home."

She gives you the most heartbreaking smile you've ever seen, and falls limply against your shoulder, thin arms snaking around your waist. "Thank you. I love you. Thank you."

She doesn't want a hospital bed brought in, insists against it. The bedroom hasn't been slept in for months, and now it must be accommodated with a a scad of medical equipment, all provided by DYAD.. They even offer to send some of the hospital nurses for home health care, but you aren't interested in Leekie's conciliatory efforts, in any tiny consolation.

For the first two weeks, there is a lot of talking. You lie in bed beside her, and the two of you reminisce in soft, intimate tones. She wants to hear all your stories, your small, meaningless anecdotes, the sort of things that usually come up naturally over time in a relationship - time the two of you won't have. You oblige, offering her every detail, and she returns the favor until the words become exhausting.

Sarah, Alison and Felix come by, most days. Alison comes bearing stacks of Tupperware, and you all gather in the bedroom and eat, pretending not to notice Cosima's food is going largely untouched. Felix teases the others mercilessly and constantly, and you love him for it because it makes her smile.

You don't sleep much, even at night, usually just drift off without meaning to, often snapping awake in a tearful panic after only an hour or so, until the soft, wheezing rattle of Cosima's breathing hits your ears. In the middle of the night, it becomes the most beautiful sound in the world.

She talks less and less as the days pass, often fading in and out during conversations, falling into sleep or something close to it. Sometimes you tell her more stories. Sometimes you slide close to her, splitting the earbuds from her iPod, and the two of you listen to music, hands clasped between. You dig out books from her still unpacked boxes and read to her. Once Alison brings by a French language copy of Le Petite Prince from her kids' bookshelf, and you read it aloud when Cosima's having a good enough day to tease you about sounding sexy reading a children's book.

You're reading from a battered old copy of Northanger Abbey one afternoon when Cosima, who's barely spoken all day, offers you a creaky, painful looking smile and says, "I'm surprised...you never pick...science journals. Or whatever."

Your throat tightens, a shadow passing over your eyes, but you only say, "These are your books, mon amour."

"I know." She goes quiet, and you start to turn back to the book, assuming she's done speaking for awhile, but then she adds, "Don't be..mad at...science."

For a moment, you think this is just incoherent mumbling, which happens sometimes, but then it dawns on you what she means. And how well she knows you.

Her fingers, which are almost always woven with yours these days, give a feeble squeeze. "Don't stop being a...huge nerd. Okay? Promise me."

Tears flood your eyes; it doesn't take much anymore. "I don't think I should make you anymore promises."

The truth is, you can't think of a lab anymore without getting angry. It's a bone deep, dangerous sort of fury, the kind that permanently warps you, and it's directed at research, at experiments, at the so called innovation that did this, but most of all, at yourself and your own failure. You're an immunologist, for God's sake, and you can't convince yourself any of it matters when you couldn't save her.

"Huge, adorable, nerd," Cosima's murmuring, her eyes drifting shut. "'S sexy."

You smile even as a few stray tears fall, and you put the book aside to settle onto the pillow beside her, dropping a gentle kiss on her temple. "Je t'aime."

Cosima makes a sound that sounds like an affirmative.

You trace a finger absently along the sharp curve of her cheekbone, listening to the comforting sound of her uncomfortable breathing as she drifts off, and every few minutes you say something just in case she's still listening.

"You're the love of my life."

"You're so beautiful."

And later, when you're sure she's asleep, barely a whisper:

"I'm afraid of what I'll become when I lose you."

When her fingernails and lips become permanently tinged with blue, you know there isn't much time left.

You can't yet say the words out loud, so you text Sarah to tell her there may not be much more lucid time. She and the others come, and for the first time in days you leave the bedroom for more than a few minutes while they go in one by one to say goodbye.

Then it's just the two of you. You, always clutching onto a hand that has become cold, and prone to spasms; leaving one hand free to gently rub vaseline over her dry, cracked lips, or feed her ice chips, or rest a cold wash cloth on her sweat drenched skin.

She says your name at random sometimes, voice distant and muted. Delphine. Even when she doesn't, you constantly make your presence known.

I'm here, mon amour.

I love you.

It's alright.

I love you.

I love you.

You stop sleeping entirely. You don't leave the room, so you don't notice the way it's started to smell like death, a smell that probably clings to you as well. You're instinctively afraid to touch her sometimes - can almost see her blood and veins and muscles through her skin - but you don't let it stop you. Sometimes you simply lie beside her, your cheek against her shoulder or your forehead on her temple, but sometimes you ease her onto your chest and hold on. Two or three times she shifts when that happens, her fingers closing unconsciously around your shirt, and it never fails to make your heart turn over in your chest.

Sometimes, without warning, that feeling of surreal awfulness grips you again out of nowhere, and you go careening toward an edge, dangerously close to genuinely, finally losing it. It plays out in different ways. Once you shove a balled up pillowcase into your mouth and scream until your throat feels like it's ripping in two. Once you become briefly but genuinely convinced that a mistake has been made, and you're the one who's dying.

And once, stupidly, you become fixated on her glasses, discarded to the bedside table for nearly two weeks now, and you gently, painstakingly place them on her closed eyes, provoking barely a twitch in reaction. But it looks all wrong, she still doesn't look like your Cosima, so you take them off and cry for nearly an hour.

It happens on a Tuesday.

You know before the sunrises it will be today, can tell it in Cosima's erratic breathing and heartbeat, in the way her eyes flicker in jerky, uncontrolled flits. You have a brief, absurd urge to shower, to get dressed, to actually put in some effort in case she gets a good, final glimpse of you.

But you're afraid to leave her for even that long. That's how close it is.

So you stretch out beside her, easing her against your shoulder, rubbing your hands up and down her arms, gentle and slow across paper thin skin.

"Delphine." Her voice is thick and wet, her eyes half lidded and darting involuntarily, but she's trying to look at you.

"I'm here."

Cosima makes another noise, like an infant trying to form words. You kiss the cool, clammy skin at the corner of her eye, then dip lower to kiss her jawline.

"I'm here. I love you." Your voice is high and wavering and wet. Childlike. "I love you."

Her lip tremble against each other, working furiously. It takes a full minute before she puffs out the word, "Love."

Your chest heaves in a short, rapid series of harsh convulsions. "I know. I know. I love you. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm here. I love you."

Under the covers, Cosima's leg kicks involuntarily. Beads of sweat are starting to trickle down her cheeks, and her eyes shut automatically against them. The fluid in her lungs is audible, breaths coming too fast.

"It's okay. It's okay to go. I'm here, and I love you. It's okay to go."

Her eyes stop flickering under closed eyelids. She makes a soft, wet noise. Your hand closes around hers. Her mouth closes, face muscles going slack.

"Cosima. Remember when you stole wine from Leekie's lecture? Remember that day. You're holding my hand and we're running outisde and, and it's cold. There's snow. It's beautiful. You're beautiful. You're in your red coat, remember? I love you. We'll steal bikes next time. Don't be scared. I'm here. It's okay.

Her chest continues to rise and fall, but it becomes increasingly hard to detect. You can't help the crying now.

"Tu es l'amour de ma vie. Je t'adore. I love you, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry..." Your voice shatters into pieces, and you give yourself a moment to press your face into her shoulder, a single, keening wail escaping, but then you remember. It's possible Cosima can still hear you. She might be scared. She needs you.

You resume your mantra. I love you. I'm here. It's okay. You put a hand to her heart. Every pause between beats slams into you. You can't see through your tears, but you keep talking. I'm here, Cosima. You're doing great, it's okay to let go, I'll stay right here. I love you. I love you.

It is a quiet kind of cataclysm. A hiss of an exhale. Four more heartbeats, and then Cosima simply...stops.

The noise level in the room doesn't change, but it feels suddenly, eerily silent.

Absurdly, you check your own heartbeat. Hard, and sluggish, but steady.

On the bedside table, the glowing digital clock clicks forward one minute. The change is impossibly jarring, as though time shouldn't be functioning. The world should not be moving forward.

You're still holding her hand. Gently, like your handling something impossibly fragile, you bring it to your lips.

Without provocation, you bolt upright in the bed like something's shocked you, then stare down at Cosima's face, seeing it from any sort of distance for the first time in over three hours.

Cosima is dead. The words run through your head, trying to sound real, to make some sort of sense. Cosima is dead. It doesn't work. You try to say it out loud, "Cosima -" Your throat locks shut instantly, rejecting it. You nearly gag on the phrase.

You scramble backwards, like her body is something terrifying, and nearly fall to the floor in a heap. There are sick animal noises in the air that could only be coming from you.

You curl up into a ball, hands over your head, rocking back and forth, not sure if you're screaming or weeping or silent.

The clock has moved through an absurd amount of numbers when you finally sit up and dimly realize you should tell someone.

The DYAD would have likely claimed Cosima's body no matter what, and you probably would have fought them on it, except Cosima made arrangements in a private will for them to have it. She claimed it was because there's still no guarantee of the vaccines long term success; they may need her as they'd needed Jennifer. But you also suspect she wanted to save you from a dangerous and empty fight.

But you don't call Leeki. You'd probably scratch his eyes out if he came here. You stare at your phone for a long time, as though some forgotten contact would make itself known. The truth is, you only want to call Cosima.

You grab her neon green phone and dial Felix. But after two rings, it's Sarah's voice, low and urgent, that answers, "Hello? Cos?"

"I..." You can't speak.

"Delphine?" Sarah tries after a moment, dread infused in her voice. "What is it, is Cosima...?"

A soft, whimpering sound lurches out of you without permission.

"Okay, okay, we're coming over. We'll be right there." Then Sarah hangs up.

They're coming. Felix and Sarah, maybe Alison. They're coming here and you haven't showered in days. Zombielike, you walk into the bathroom and stand under the cold spray of shower, clothes and all, for exactly one minute before walking out again, and resuming your position on the bed beside Cosima, curled close, your forehead resting against her shoulder.

You don't hear the door, or their footsteps: only Sarah's muffled cry, and Felix's involuntary, "Oh, bloody Christ."

There's the hushed murmur of whispers, but you don't pay attention until Felix steps into your line of vision, Sarah barely visible behind. He sounds like he's talking to a crazy person, slow and placating, as he says, "Delphine. Darling? You're going to have to get up now, alright? We're going to have to call someone."

"She's soaking wet," Sarah murmurs from behind him.

"Bloody shivering..." Felix pulls a soft, red blanket from the foot of the bed and leans over, tucking a hand under your elbow and tugging you up. He drapes the blanket around your shoulders.

Your gaze lands on Sarah and stays there. Her face is so flushed and expressive and alive. You can't stop staring. Can't stop trying to see someone who's gone.

You adamantly refuse to let Felix or Sarah call DYAD, but also refuse to offer any alternatives about who should take the body. Other than that argument, you can't muster the strength for much. You haven't slept in days.

Felix starts handing you booze, you drink anything he puts into your hand, and when you wake up you're on the sofa in his loft, covered with a blanket, the very place Cosima first told you she was sick. Right away you're crying.

The body goes to DYAD, so there's no funeral. Alison takes charge and plans a wake, but it's not much: you, Alison, Sarah, Felix, Kira and, probably because Sarah wanted more bodies, Paul and Art. The food spread could accommodate three times that. Alison asks if you want to say something, but there aren't words big enough. You haven't spoken in two days, because there aren't words for anything you're feeling.

Sarah and Alison try their best. They talk about Cosima researching her own condition even from a hospital bed. About her drive to keep them all from experiencing her illness. How she saved them.

And you sit there with balled up fists and hot, streaming tears because it isn't fair, hating DYAD and hating yourself and hating every one of them who gets to live when she didn't.

Felix speaks, too, warm but brief, and when he's clearly run out of things to say, he looks around awkwardly, seemingly realizing that he's a piss poor closer but that no one else is likely to do better.

You make a soft, involuntary sound. This isn't enough, this "off the radar" wake, where half the people here didn't really know Cosima. You know, intellectually, it doesn't really matter, that this would be the least of her worries, but it just feels like salt poured carelessly into a gaping wound.

But then Alison stands up. "Sorry, I thought of something I wanted to add." She clears her throat primly, taking a moment to look at every person in the room. "We keep saying how grateful we are to Cosima. And we are. But that doesn't make it fair that she died. She shouldn't have had to be a martyr. There...isn't much that can make us feel better about that. We shouldn't feel better about that." She pauses, then slowly turns, her eyes locking with yours, gaze heavy and deliberate. "But one day, when we want to...to take solace in something...at least we know this: since she got sick, Cosima's never been alone. She was loved. Deeply. And she knew she was loved." For a moment, ghosts flicker across Alison's face, her eyes going distant, but then she snaps back into the moment, and she seems to be speaking only to you when she says in a quietly forceful voice, "That's not a small thing."

A few others murmur in agreement. You want to thank her, but you're crying too hard to speak. So when she walks back outside the strange semi circle they've formed, you reach out for her forearm and pull her into a quick hug, all fingertips and shoulder blades.

Alison's surprised expression is quickly chased away by sympathy. Your grief has made them all trust you in a way they never did before, even when the DYAD was giving them vaccines. Either that or you have been rendered so weak and pitiable that you couldn't possibly pose a threat.

She pats your arm, and looks like she wants to say something more, but it still hurts to look at her, or Sarah, so you quickly turn away.

Five minutes later you steal a wine bottle off the refreshment table and slip outside. You'd like to think Cosima would approve.

The world is quiet. You wander a few blocks and sit down hard on the curb. You pour wine down your throat like medication and dig into your coat pockets for a cigarette. It takes five minutes to pull one out and get it lit, your fingers are trembling so badly, but you gag the second the smoke hits your lungs, and all you can think is Cosima struggling to breathe, coughing until it hurt. Disgusted with yourself, you crunch the burning end of the cigarette against your wrist, wanting to see if you can even feel it.

There's snow on the ground, but the wine warms you up, and anyway, the snow reminds you of that day: the sun flaring above you, her hand in yours, stolen wine and cold air knifing your lungs in a pleasantly painful way. Her red coat and glasses and dreads. Her smile.

You rewind and replay the memory on an endless loop until you get too cold, and you stand up to go, but immediately run into a problem.

Alison's house is closest, but Alison's house has Alison's face, Alison's vaccinated immune system, Alison's all-wrong smile. Felix's loft has Sarah, with the same issues. The DYAD has Cosima's body, somewhere, closed into a drawer, along with the memories of your failure. And your apartment smells like death.

There's nowhere for you to go.

You sit back down in the snow. You replay the memory.