She felt terrible. Not physically; physically, she felt absolutely fine. But in every other way...
Sarah lay on her back on the bed in the lab that had been transformed into a quarantine bay, staring up at the ceiling. Her eyes stung but she blinked back tears, knowing they were futile. Crying wouldn't fix anything; crying wouldn't make the plague she'd managed to bring back with her disappear.
When she heard the door to the room open, she assumed it was one of the medics in their hazmat suits, coming to take some more blood or run another test. When she felt warm skin against her fingers, she jumped, eyes wide as she stared at the person who'd moved to stand beside her bed.
"It's not your fault," Jess told her quietly, giving her hand a squeeze before breaking contact, moving to sit on the edge of the bed opposite Sarah's own. "You didn't know this was going to happen so don't start blaming yourself."
"What are you doing in here?" Sarah sat up on the bed, swinging her legs over the side of it so she could face Jess. "You shouldn't be… Oh. No. Oh, please tell me you're not..."
"Infected?" Jess's smile was forced, humourless. "Sorry. I wish I could."
"Oh, my god. Jess, I'm so sorry." The tears were back, stinging her eyes as she stared at the pale young woman. "I should never have come back here. Danny should never have brought me here." Anger surged through her, tinged with confusion. "Damn it, why did he do that? If he knew, why did he bring me here..?"
"Because he wanted to save you," Jess answered quietly, even though she knew it'd been a rhetorical question. "From what I've been told, I think Danny maybe didn't know you were contagious or were going to become contagious so quickly. But even if he had known..." She shrugged a shoulder. "He obviously cares about you a lot to risk his life to go back and save you from the predators."
"He's a good friend," Sarah admitted with a shrug, not wanting to divulge just how good when the man himself wasn't there – and, she worried, wouldn't make it back until it was too late. Again. "But if he'd known what this would do, I'm sure he'd have thought of something else. He wouldn't have brought me here knowing…" She broke off and bit her lip. "Is it just you?"
"So far." Jess shrugged her shoulders. "Apparently they put a rush on my results because they kind of suspected I would test positive."
Sarah's brow furrowed momentarily. "Why would they suspect…?"
"Our… visitors... from the future. They know more than they originally let on." Jess shrugged again but stared down at her hands rather than meeting Sarah's questioning gaze.
The door to the room opened again before Sarah could press her for more details, and a resigned Connor walked in, one laptop back slung over his shoulder with another laptop Jess recognised as her own in his hands.
"You, too?" Sarah closed her eyes when the unusually quiet scientist nodded, passing Jess her laptop before sitting on the bed beside the Field Co-ordinator. "I'm so sorry, Connor."
"S'not your fault," Connor told her quietly, no trace of blame in his voice or on his face though Sarah still had her eyes closed and couldn't see him. Turning to Jess, he nudged the young woman with his elbow and gave her a reassuring smile. "Look on the bright side: we get to be roomies again."
Barely managing a small chuckle, Jess tightened her grip on the laptop he'd given her. Connor wrapped his arm around her shoulders and she leaned against him for a moment, drawing comfort from his presence no matter how much she wished he wasn't there, too.
With a sigh, she pulled away, resolutely opening the laptop on her knee. "We've got work to do."
"We do." Pushing their situation to the back of his mind, Connor reached for his own laptop. "Why don't you send me what you've done so far and I'll try and catch up?"
As the two allowed themselves to become swept away by their challenge, Sarah opened her eyes and watched them work, praying her return wouldn't come at the cost of someone else.
The positive side of it was that no one else was showing signs of infection. The negative side was that the grim events that the Matt from the future looked like they were happening just as they had in the timeline their future visitors were trying to change.
Abby was distraught at the thought of losing her fiancé and two of her closest friends – one of them for the second time. The reassurances she received that Connor survived his initial bout with the virus weren't very comforting when future Matt couldn't or wouldn't tell her whether he survived when the virus mutated.
Standing on the other side of the window overlooking the room that had become the quarantined medical bay, she wrapped her arms around her middle and gazed into Connor's eyes as he moved to join her.
"It's going to be okay," Connor told her through the private comm link Jess had set up for them, his smile a little too bright to be believable. "You'll see."
"Connor." Biting her lip, Abby tightened her arms around herself. "You don't know that for sure."
"I know I'm gonna live long enough to marry you," he replied instantly, hope that he was telling the truth shining in his dark eyes. "Look, you've got nothing to worry about. I feel fine. Danny'll be back any day now from his jaunt to the future and even if he isn't, with me and Jess working on this thing, you know we'll get it done in time."
Abby wanted to believe him, desperately, but couldn't quite bring herself to do so. At the mention of the Field Co-ordinator and their former flatmate, her gaze slipped past Connor to the woman sitting cross-legged on the middle bed in the room with her laptop in front of her. Abby frowned, noting the pallor of Jess's skin and the extra layers of clothing the young woman was wearing. "She doesn't look very well."
Following her gaze for a moment, Connor turned back to his fiancée with a guilty expression on his face. "It's affecting her differently," he confessed quietly, not wanting to be overheard by his roommates. "I overheard Doctor Robson talking with one of the medics. She hadn't recovered fully from the run in with the beetles so her immune system's already weakened."
Abby's expression softened and she looked at Connor in sympathetic understanding. "It's not your fault, Connor. You can't keep blaming yourself for what happened."
"I opened the anomaly in the first place, let the beetles come through it. How is it not my fault?" When she couldn't reply, he shook his head, his shoulders drooping. "She'll be okay, yeah?"
"Yeah." If her smile was a little thin, he didn't comment on it. "Are you sure you're feeling okay, Con? Is there anything else I can bring you from home?"
"The only thing I want I can't have," Connor told her with a lopsided grin. "And wouldn't really want, since it'd mean you coming in here and that's a risk we're not gonna take."
"I wish I could." Unwrapping an arm from her middle, she pressed her hand against the glass between them. "Promise me you'll be okay?"
Connor smiled at her and repeated the gesture, placing his palm against hers on the other side of the window. "Nothin's gonna stop me from marrying you, Abs. I promise you that."
Blinking back the tears that sprung to her eyes, she managed a watery smile. "I can't wait."
Do I have to start apologising again...? ;)
