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In her dreams, they're dancing. Allison loosens up; Helena is coming towards them, slowly but picking up speed all of the time; Cosima uses up almost all of the breath that she has left in laughing. Felix leans his back against hers and Sarah feels like she could take on the world. Like there's nothing that she couldn't take on with her family at her side. They dance to the song that Cosima picked and, for a split second, Sarah could swear that every single one of their hearts is beating in time. There's still a low, warm burn in her belly that started when Cal kissed her in the hallway. All of the love inside her, filling her up until she's almost overbrimming with it - all of that love is a light.
And she is pulling towards that light.
But she still wakes in darkness.
The first time she was pregnant, she was on her in New York. She craved ice-chips and raspberry popsicles. She had morning sickness the whole time. She listened to a lot of Joe Strummer, the more mellow solo stuff. For a long time, she missed Cal like something burning inside of her.
But all things pass.
This time feels nothing, like she's made out of stone. They've planted a seed in her, in the wet, fertile earth of her, like she's nothing more than a plot of fucking land to be farmed. DYAD have ringed her in fences, kept her separate from everything she loves. She lies on that bench in that black room and covers her face with her hands. She will two heartbeats to stop dead.
Nothing happens. Their hearts still beat in time.
She tries not to hate the baby - it's not like the baby is responsible - and reserves all of her hate for Marian, who didn't keep her word and for Rachel, who did exactly what everyone expected.
So fuck them both, right? Sarah's got nothing left in her but acid and empty space.
She thinks about Mrs S a lot, about Siobhan. Not the fights - she can't focus on that - but the quiet times when she was a kid, before she met Vic and got so busy trying to burn the whole bloody world down. She thinks about times when they sat together on the settee that was sagging in the middle and watched old Hollywood musicals, how she still knows all of the words to the Sound of Music and the King and I. She thinks about Felix crawling up into her lap. She thinks about how 'loved' and 'safe' came to mean the same thing in her head, got mixed together and intermingled and how, somehow, she forgot that once she was a mother herself. For a while at least.
She remembers now.
She hopes that Kira's safe - she asks and asks, but Rachel won't tell her anything. All she knows is that DYAD don't have Kira, so that must mean that she's safer than Sarah. She's somewhere safe. Maybe she's with Mrs S or Felix or Allison, even. Allison and Donnie would probably do a sickeningly good job. Mostly, Sarah likes to imagine Kira with Cal out at the cabin, feeding the chickens. He takes her photo a lot. He tells her stories about Sarah. Sometimes, Sarah fantasises about getting out of here, burning everything down in her wake and making it out there, back out to the countryside where Cal will be waiting on the porch with a beer. She'd take it from him, steal the tiniest sip imaginable, just enough to catch a taste that would be echoed on his mouth when she leaned down to kiss him. Depending on her mood, the way that he reacts to the baby changes. Either he ignores it completely or he puts his hand on her, warm and broad, and he tells her that none of it matters, than he'll take care of her. That she doesn't need to survive on her own anymore.
She's been surviving on her own for so long.
When she's not being prodded and probed, she curls up as tight as she can, arms around her legs, pulls herself in tight, tries to pretend that her body is still her own. She started her periods early, lost her virginity at fourteen, had an abortion when she was seventeen. There isn't much that she hasn't tried, hasn't failed at, hasn't come through anyway. She's had concussions and broken bones but, until now, no scars. They could have done it much more neatly, but, instead, she's left with a long scar; the shape of it changes as her belly grows. She can only think that she must have Rachel to thank for that - an eye for an eye and all that, right?
She dreams about running a lot - not running anywhere in particular, but the process of moving. She flies down a lot of stairs, jumps onto a lot of trains. She's never liked planes, the way that they leave you nowhere to go, but trains are always stopping. Once, a long time ago, she took the train from Toronto to New York, which took just about twelve hours. She slept for most of that, woke up feeling strange and disorientated.
Distance. She always loved distance, tinged blue at the edges, somehow cool to the touch.
*
He's finished examining her and she pulls the paper gown down around her knees. Naked hasn't always been good for Sarah; it took her a long time to get used to Paul touching her. She doesn't examine too closely how good Cal's hands felt on her bare skin. The doctor's hands are cool and dry, swathed in latex. She shouldn't take any of it personally. If it wasn't her…
But that's bullshit, isn't it? It couldn't be Cosima or Allison or the others. Helena would reject it out of spite.
It has to be her.
She imagines her body as a garden, not a graveyard.
It's a moment before she realises that Rachel is standing there. For a single, rage-filled second, Sarah wants to rip the paper gown off her skin and show Rachel the marks there, the swell of her belly. She wants to spit in her face. She wants to tear herself apart with her fingernails and make Rachel watch.
But then there's the fucking fearful empty hollow of Rachel's ruined eye and remembers the look on Rachel's face after Ethan died. So maybe Rachel does know something about loss.
Rachel doesn't say anything; she almost never does. She just stares at Sarah with one cold eye and then she goes, leaving Sarah alone again. Sarah's never had it easy, Christ knows, but she's still got no idea how Rachel got so goddamned cold.
Sarah shivers, wraps her arms around her belly like a fence or an ocean.
She can't help it. That will to survive is in the bone.
It touches them both.
*
In her dreams, they're dancing. She feels tiny in his arms, fragile in a way that she's rarely had a chance to feel, because she's always been so focused on believing that her bones were made of steel. It's sort of weird and dizzying to believe in someone as deeply as she believes in Cal; she honestly thinks he'd die to keep her safe. Or to keep Kira safe. Which might as well be the same thing.
There are words that Sarah's never really attached to anyone in her life, but she thinks them, sometimes, where Cal's concerned.
He steps away from her for a moment, handsome and tousled in the dim light.. Her pregnancy feels like it's more of a part of her here, like her body is a parabola of her own design. Cal smiles and sketches a bow for her. His hair tumbles into his eyes. That low, lovely heat is back in her belly.
She reaches out, takes his hand and pulls towards the light.