Visiting Hours

Grace
Grace lies in a cot in the lab. It's white and sterile, but it's not like she minds. White is good. White is blank. At least there is no red. She hasn't the same fears as Sera, but it's likely that they'll all be sharing a few fears from now on.

She can't text, no phone. She can't code, no computer. So she stares with tired eyes up at a white ceiling, letting her mind take her where it will (except to certain places).

It's not sleep that she's trying for. Sleep is impossible. Just, a little blankness. The peace of nothing.

She still wears that grey jacket, with jeans that look like someone poured bleach into the wash instead of soap. She has changed clothes, put the others into the biohazard waste bin -- all except for that jacket, which she keeps wearing like it's going to protect her. She bought it because of zombies. Unfortunately, one cannot shoot a virus, or wear a jacket to protect against them. They just eat you anyway.

Serafi­ne
There's a knock at the door.  It is far from insistent, but there's a certain expectation to it. There always is in places like these: it's not a request for permission so much as a warning.  I'm coming in.

So the door to the lab swings open and an arc of light from the central hallway cuts into the room.  It's a small office, and closed for the nonce.  There aren't many options vis-a-vis visitors.

Sera tucks her head inside.  She is dressed, now, in something other than the bloodied and filthy clothes they found her wearing: the white t-shirt, the gray sweats.  Christ, what a choice.  No: now, a band t-shirt and yoga pants of some sort and bare feet and her hair loose but still unwashed.  Greasy.

The worst of the hallucinations have passed, but they still bubble at the extremes of her vision and sometimes bloom back into full and terrifying life.

Now though: a cough by way of interruption to match the knock, Sera framed by the light from the hall, pauses to see whether or not Grace is asleep, and crosses the room when she determines or decides that Grace is awake, just - staring.

Sera's path is slow and painful and she is wracked by a coughing fit mid-stream but terrible as she feels: she's getting better.  She knows that, too.

"Hey," a skeletal hand on Grace's shoulder, when Sera gains the edge of the cot.  She doesn't think, doesn't remember.  Is reaching up to touch Grace's hair thoughtlessly.  Gracefully.  Gracelessly as she always does.  "You gonna be okay?"

Grace
The knock on the door barely even gets through to her. There are noises sometimes. They don't bother her. But Sera, in her band shirt and yoga pants and that sensation of raw fascination, well... one can't help but look. The staring eyes then stare at Sera.

Skeletal Sera, whose yoga pants don't hide that fact. Whose body won't let her move, and she coughs and shuffles, and tries to comfort Grace.

And that confuses. Shouldn't she be comforting Sera instead?

Unlike most times, the touch doesn't seem to bother her. She's just been through too much to feel.

"I should be asking you that question. I didn't think you'd be ready for visitors yet."

Serafi­ne
"'m not, really," ready for visitors yet, Sera says, with a smile that feels terrible and starched and grated and sad and generous, all at once.  Grace does not flinch from the touch, so there's nothing to remind Sera that it might not be welcome, so instead: her hand settles and her fingers curl through the fine strands of Grace's hair.

That's true.  Her hair is filthy, dark with grease, tangled and perhaps even matted a bit.  She is still sick, still feverish, still nauseated, has not made the first attempt at consuming solid food.  Still in danger of dehydration.  But:

"Don't really wanna stay here, either.  I wanna go home.  Hawksley and Dan are gonna take me.  So," and her hand stills, palm cupping the crown of Grace's head.  " - you still haven't answered me.  You gonna be okay?"

Grace
At that, Grace sits up in her cot, whether Sera's hands are locked in her hair or not. "Sera, you can't. You're still infected."

The words should have some weight behind them, but Grace says them with all the emotive quality of a robot.

"Give the cure time to work. You could still be contagious."

And no, she is not going to answer the question.

Serafi­ne
Grace sits up, and Sera's hand slides from her hair then.  It's for the best, joins her other hand wrapped around the metal frame beneath the thin mattress, where she's holding on to keep herself upright.

"I can't stay here," Sera's shaking her head, already shrugging off Grace's objections.  There's as quiet thread of insistence beneath the words, though that gives them a weight Sera's raw throat and battered lungs cannot quite manage.  "I just can't.

"I hate these places."  Even a doctor's office with real beds to make the exam rooms seem as un-hospital-like is possible is still: a medical facility.  With a bed.  With cabinets and frames and posters on the walls.  With an industrious, industrial certainty and a fucking lock on the door.

Probably, Sera doesn't know.

"I won't go out until I'm not infectious anymore, I just can't be here.  But listen.  If you need anything, I'll have Dan give you his number.  'Til I get a new phone, you can call him about anything, you know?

"He's cool."

Grace
In her mind's eye, Grace imagines Hawksley or Dan waking up from nightmares with a nosebleed, and shakes her head.

"I don't have a phone either," she says, and her eyes kind of glaze over with the memory of that. Strange how she was more concerned about her laptop than the people who fried. At the time, there was only the goal. And Callum was an obstacle, removed.

"If anyone you know starts showing symptoms... Just don't stop until they come here and get treated --" she says, her words cut off by a still horrible-sounding cough. There's not much blood left in her lungs, but she can feel it still. Getting better. Not there yet.

Serafi­ne
"I know Grace.  Don't worry.  They're not gonna get sick."

Sera says that looking right at Grace; all direct eye contact.  Her own are bloodshot and bruised, the color lost in the low lighting of the room, familiar and wounded, these sinks of shadow.  Pain etched into the fine lines that radiate from them.

"And if they do, they'll come here.  I just - "

can't.  Sera can't.  She can't.  She can't.

Sera is quiet as Grace coughs.  Her mouth flattened as she struggles with the need to clear her own lungs.  She wins for now, but only at the cost of some rattling breath.

"Dan'll bring you a phone.  Then you can call him - " and Sera doesn't understand, really, what happened there in the end.  The electronic pulse, or even how crippled Grace may be without her computer, but if Grace doesn't have a phone right now, she will, assuredly, in a few hours.

"Call if you need anything, okay?    And Grace?  Thank you for coming back for me."

Grace
"I couldn't leave you there. I thought, if they had some security in the way, I could bypass it. I really wasn't much help, though. I just couldn't leave you both there," she says, repeats, and again the voice is hollow.
"I know you'd come back for me."

She looks back at Sera, but those eyes -- there is nothing there. Like Grace has left for the time being, and may return, or may not. Like she's just going through the motions of being human, for Sera's sake.

Serafi­ne
Sera does not quite take note of that missing spark in Grace's eyes. Not tonight.  Not this morning.  There's too much there for her to see, and some essential part of Sera has closed itself off as well.  It is the morning after, no longer than that, and Serafíne has hardly begun processing her own trauma.  The fact of it, both physical and psychological.

Perhaps she never will.

Sera spends her life throwing herself into the next thing, and the next thing, and the thing after that, and never looks back.  Not really, not entirely.

Sometimes, see: she just refuses to turn around.

--

So, this too feels like ritual.  The bedside visit.  The thanks and return: the reassurance of safety.
I'm fine.  I'm fine.

Sera will have an easier time going home than any of them.  Dan has cleaned the rugs and scrubbed her bathroom and hauled out the old, bloodstained mattress.  He has: secured a new one and new sheets and duvet and washed them three times and made the bed.  Laid in supplies of everything Sera wants when she is sick, which is: everything, and she's leaving the Verbena's office to go right home.  To collapse into her bed, where she can cry in peace, where she knows that the only locks on the door are the locks that she controls.  Where the windows open up onto a view of a garden-in-winter and a oak tree losing its leaves and the skyline of Denver tucked in beyond that.

"'Course I would," Sera returns, with a grimacing sort-of-smile that nevertheless seems genuine.  It is.  Sera wouldn't've left Grace behind.  "Get better."

Then Sera turns to go.  Her strength is low, and half-way across the room she sort-of staggers.  Rights herself, recovers.

Someone's at the door waiting for her, pushes it open when that happens and Dan comes in to slip an arm around her spine, beneath her arms.  He gives Grace a quick, apologetic smile over her shoulder and walks her out of the room.

Grace is left to sink back into that nothing she was seeking so diligently, alone.  Maybe she drifts, later, into true sleep.  Either way, later she finds that Sera was as good as her word.

Grace finds the newest version of her old phone left out for her on one of the counters in the lab.  There's a handwritten note:

"Hope this works!  Let me know if you prefer something else.  - D."

Grace
Sera's gone, and so is Grace, back to staring at the ceiling. Still not daring to open up that miasma of fear inside. Eventually sleep wins, as it always does. But she wakes in the middle.

In her dreams, there is a delicate wasp in her hand, and suddenly the world shifts, the ground drops out from beneath her, and as she falls her skin sloughs off in sudden heat. And there is Sera, looking like a dying angel beside her, asking if she'll be okay.

It's upon waking from that, that she notices the phone. It stands out, black on the white in this room, blinking a purple dot of light at her. She walks up, reads the note, and clutches it to her chest for a while. It's just a phone, but more than that. It is connection. This is a symbol of that which she needs to find -- that wholeness of being at one with others, with the world.

She calls Dan when she can. Asks about Sera, in a voice that still sounds empty. Sera will get better. They'll all get better. At least their shells will. But when Lena finally speaks, and it's to accuse Luke of being a Hydra agent trying to kill her...

What of who they really are? Will they get better?