Chapter Text
Jane doesn’t see Sophie for months after Evelyn dies.
That’s imprecise. She doesn’t see much of anyone, the way Evelyn meant it. Not in the philosophical way where you look into another person’s eyes and see yourself, and feel fundamentally that they are a person like you.
Other people are there, of course—the little girl running in circles in the park, the old custodian at the hospital, the corner store cashier who hands her coffee every morning—but she doesn’t see them. She can’t stand to meet an understanding eye.
And Sophie isn’t there, full stop.
Vanished, like Evelyn was the only thing that ever tied them.
Jane throws herself into her work in the wake. She tells a few of her coworkers, briefly, what happened—Muriel Cordero because they worked together the day after the funeral and Jane felt like she was going to burst, David Alegros when he finds her crying in the storeroom a week later—and they say the right things. They’re good at calming grieving people. She knew they would be; they’ve all had too much practice.
Otherwise she bottles it up. Saying it out loud isn’t the release she secretly hoped it would be, because Cordero and Alegros never knew Evelyn and so they can’t really understand, and she doesn’t want to be pitied. And it feels irresponsible somehow to bring her own grief into the workplace when everyone administering Pasithea powder is already wading neck-deep through secondhand trauma.
Besides, she tells herself, helping people through her work at the clinic is the best way to honor Evelyn’s memory.
That’s not quite it. It’s more like he’s living in her mind, and she has to be able to justify the time she has that he didn’t get. She couples cat naps with caffeine pills and hears him, wryly, Ah, the Jane Gonzalez Special, as though he wasn’t just as bad. The ability to ease the suffering of others is an imperative to do so until the very last second she’s able. Until Isabel Rowley herself pats her shoulder and urges her to go home.
Most nights, she returns to the cathedral apartment well after dark, feet aching. The apartment is leased until the end of the year, which seems far enough off that she will never have to consider moving out. The kitchen light that she always forgets to turn off in the mornings glows yellow. Over the sink, the potted basil is drooping and limp.
She drops her purse by the door; she pulls on Evelyn’s frayed bathrobe that barely smells like him anymore; she stumbles to the fridge for something to eat.
Then one night there’s a knock on the door. She opens it, and there stands Sophie Green.
She looks terrible. Sallow, hollow-eyed and scruffy. For a moment they stare at each other like strangers. Then, dizzily, Sophie says, “Hey.”
“What are you doing here?” Jane asks, letting her in and then bolting the door behind her.
She shouldn’t be here. Jane can’t make her exhausted brain make sense of her presence, because surely she’s supposed to be flying some military mission right now, because she hadn’t called or texted or anything, because why would she come to Jane’s apartment of all places—
“Can I spend the night?” Sophie asks. It’s a little hard to understand her.
In the lamplight she looks even worse. Something smells, like sweat or mildew, and her expression is crumpled and desperate.
“Are you alright? Is there some sort of medical emergency, or—or—”
“I just need a place to sleep,” Sophie says. “Then I’ll be okay, I—please, Jane. One night.”
Sophie’s drunk, she thinks, or high, and Jane is past the point of being able to process the emotions crashing over her. Something about the way Sophie says her name squeezes like a fist in her chest.
At her hesitation, Sophie says, “I was fucked up in Santa Pedra and I didn’t know where else to go.”
“Okay,” Jane says. Sophie’s expression doesn’t betray surprise, but her shoulders drop a fraction of an inch. Relief. “Yes, okay. Do you want the sofa?”
Sophie nods, and the next moment, she collapses like a heap of dirty laundry onto the sofa, falling so abruptly still that Jane panics and thinks she died.
“Oh my god,” she says, reaching for her pulse, but Sophie spasms reflexively and Jane snatches her hand back. Alive.
Okay. She takes a deep breath, then gets a bottle of aspirin and a glass of water from the kitchen and puts them on the floor next to the sofa. Somehow Sophie is already fast asleep. Under the dirty creases of her jacket her back rises and falls rhythmically. Jane stares for a moment at the familiar, crooked angles of her shoulders and knees. Then she pulls the bathrobe tighter around her and goes to turn off the lights.
It’s only much later, when the moon has disappeared behind the dome of the cathedral and she has twisted her bedsheets into knots with her tossing and turning, that she thinks, This used to be his apartment, too. Of course she came here.
The next morning, Jane checks the sofa as soon as she wakes up. It’s empty. She almost thinks she dreamed the strange visit from the night before. She has been sleeping poorly, after all, and irregular waking patterns make her remember dreams vividly. She flips on the bathroom light and then jolts so hard she knocks her metal toothbrush cup off the corner of the sink.
Sophie’s in the shower.
Not naked, not bathing, just folded up in the corner—it’s not a real shower. This is something that Sophie used to laugh at. There’s a showerhead that points half at the tiled floor and half at the toilet and the whole bathroom is maybe five feet wide and Sophie’s wedged herself into the tiny rectangle of empty space, knees folded like she’s in an escape pod, arms crossed like she’s in a coffin.
At the clash of metal on tile her head lifts, eyes narrowed against the light.
“You almost gave me a coronary,” Jane says, voice barely controlled. “Were you sleeping?”
“Trying to,” Sophie mumbles.
If it’s a jab at Jane for waking her, the situation is too ridiculous for it to land. “Are you feeling okay?” Jane asks. “Or… better than last night?”
“I’m doing fabulous,” Sophie says without moving. “You need the shower?”
“I will in a minute,” Jane says. Her heart rate is still elevated from the surprise of finding Sophie on the floor. But she doesn’t want to seem rattled, so she retrieves her toothbrush and brushes her teeth, feeling irrationally self-conscious about brushing her teeth with Sophie there. Without her hair done, her face washed, or a bra on, she feels bare.
But when Jane puts her toothbrush away Sophie’s dead-eyed stare is fixed on the water stains on the ceiling, as though she has entirely forgotten Jane’s presence.
“Alright, I need to shower now,” Jane says. “Can you get up on your own?”
“Yeah, yeah,” says Sophie, pushing herself clumsily to her feet. Jane shrinks back to let her past, then closes the door and leans against it.
It’s obvious that Sophie needs clean clothes and a shower. And breakfast. There’s something deeply unsettling about seeing Sophie as discomposed as she is.
Not that Jane has never seen her in bad shape before; since she first met her, Jane has seen Sophie projectile-vomit through a window, show up high to a Dean’s dinner, and break her leg falling off the gym roof, but there was always a repressive instinct. Even as Sophie sat white-faced on the ground behind the gym with her leg at the wrong angle, she was trying to crack self-deprecating jokes.
It’s like she has to be the one telling the story, even when it’s about herself—especially when it’s about herself. Maybe that’s what unsettles Jane now; that it doesn’t even seem to occur to Sophie to care what conclusions Jane is drawing.
Maybe Jane overestimates how much Sophie cares about her opinion. This isn’t high school anymore.
Steam fills the air as hot water washes over her. She didn’t sleep well last night—though better than Sophie, she suspects—and she doesn’t look forward to work. She bought groceries two days ago so she can make something simple to eat, maybe eggs and toast, and then convince Sophie to submit to an examination for a concussion or an overdose or any injury that might require urgent attention, before Jane leaves.
When she emerges from the bathroom, though, she can’t find Sophie. She searches, too, after that morning’s jumpscare, but Sophie’s not tucked under the table or curled up in the closet or anything. She just—left.
Jane locks the front door behind her, then unlocks it to go check the second bedroom. Empty.
It’s not like Sophie’s departure was any stranger than her arrival. She needed one night, fine. But still Jane feels wrongfooted, cheated of a goodbye. Don’t they owe each other real goodbyes now?
She locks the door again.
Sophie returns that evening. Jane’s in the kitchen, heating up dinner, when she knocks. Before she can reach the door she knocks again, louder.
“Hey,” Sophie says as soon as the door opens, “Can I spend the night here?”
She’s wearing the same stinking, creased jacket. Her gaze is a little clearer than last time, but her eyes are just as bloodshot.
“Only if you tell me what’s going on,” Jane says, a little sharply.
Sophie has the grace to look sorry. “Sorry, yeah. I don’t remember much of last night, but I was pretty out of it. I, uh, hope I didn’t scare you or anything. Can I come in?”
“Please,” Jane says, and Sophie follows her to the kitchen. Instead of taking a chair she sits on the counter, back bent to avoid the overhead cabinets. “What are you doing in Santa Pedra? I thought you were stationed off-planet.”
“I’m not on duty right now,” Sophie says. Jane reaches for the cabinet behind her head and she ducks to let her get the chili powder.
“Did you quit?”
“I didn’t quit,” Sophie says. “It was—no, I went AWOL a few too many times, it doesn’t matter, they’re reassigning me.”
“Why did you go AWOL?”
“How many times have you missed work in the last three months?” Sophie asks.
It’s strange to know exactly what she means. A raw sense of kinship she doesn’t associate with Sophie. “Only the once.” The funeral. Even during the first, most horrific days, the idea of staying home in the apartment Evelyn used to share with her was ten times worse than going to the hospital.
“Oh,” says Sophie, and Jane wonders how many times a few too many is, and where she went looking for solace. “I’m not in trouble. It just wasn’t working. They’re looking for somewhere—safer.”
So her commanding officers don’t know what to do with her now. It’s a familiar story at this point in the war. Burnt out, traumatized soldiers get hidden away or demoted, tucked out of sight so they won’t affect enlistment rates. Jane feels sick at the thought of it happening to Sophie. It’s a better fate than death in combat, obviously, but.
“What are you cooking? It smells familiar,” Sophie says.
Memory washes over Jane, tight in her throat. “It’s—we called it falafel secundum. It was his specialty. It’s just dressed up leftovers from last night. I’d usually just eat it with rice but Evelyn would fry up whatever vegetables needed to get eaten, make a whole dish.”
“They found me in a station hostel halfway to Letnos,” Sophie says. “Register said I’d checked in with someone and I don’t even remember who. Second lieutenant looked like he was going to cry, first lieutenant looked like she smelled a promotion. I’m still a captain, though.” She laughs. “Still got that!”
“You should take better care of yourself,” Jane says.
“You’re overwatering the basil again,” Sophie says, and sticks her finger in the soil of the pot.
“When was I the one with the green thumb?”
“Poor thing’s drowning,” Sophie says.
“Sophie,” Jane says, turning off the stove, “You’re changing the subject.”
“What was the subject?”
“Not the basil. You, what’s going on with you? Where have you been?”
“You don’t want to hear that,” Sophie says.
“Fine, then at least tell me what happened to you last night. Were you drunk?”
Sophie looks at the floor. “Yeah. That was it.”
“You scared me,” Jane says. “You could’ve called ahead.”
“I didn’t know where I was going until I got here,” Sophie confesses.
This time Jane does offer Sophie a bath towel and a change of clothes. She waits for the inevitable jab about the tiny bathroom, something about I’ll shower and use the toilet at the same time, it’ll be so fucking efficient, but it never comes.
When Sophie emerges, her hair stands up in little wet spikes, and she looks angular and bedraggled in a cat-in-a-rainstorm sort of way. She makes a beeline for the couch.
“You don’t have to sleep out here,” Jane says. “There’s… there’s an empty bed in Evelyn’s room.”
Sophie looks at her like she just suggested shooting a child. Jane feels a rush of shame, and then indignance at the reaction.
“I mean, you could.”
“Not fucking happening,” Sophie says.
“Okay! You don’t have to, I just know that the sofa isn’t the most comfortable, and you seem like you could use a good night of sleep.”
And if she were in Evelyn’s room, Jane could hear if she got up in the night. The wall between the two bedrooms is paper-thin—you could hear if the other person coughed too loud. It was annoying at times, comforting at others; she’d never cried for long before he came to check on her.
“You could sleep in my bed, if you prefer, and I’ll take Evelyn’s,” she adds. She did that, for a while, until the sheets just smelled like her.
This time she sees her physically flinch at his name. “No. Stop, just—stop. I’ll sleep out here. I’ll sleep on the floor, I don’t care.”
Jane frowns. “I really don’t think Evelyn would mind—”
“Would you stop fucking talking about him?”
Jane feels like she’s been slapped. “Are you alright?” It’s a rhetorical question at this point. “There are… people, you can talk to, you know. About grief and things like that.”
“I’m fine.”
“Okay! Okay.” Jane breathes hard. “Then I’ll sleep out here with you. You just look like you’re about to throw up and I would rather not leave you alone. Just—help me drag out a mattress, okay?”
The coffee table has to be pushed aside to make room for Jane’s narrow mattress, but Sophie doesn’t protest the effort. She’s as strong as ever; Jane suspects she could have carried the mattress alone. She asks for an aspirin. Jane obliges, then turns out the light and crawls onto her mattress.
In the dark she listens to Sophie’s breathing. It’s strange not to be alone in the apartment. For weeks her only company has been the creaking of the building’s old pipes.
“I’m not going to throw up on you, by the way,” Sophie says. “I was a little bit nauseous but I won’t. Just in case you were worried.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Jane says.
After a split-second, Sophie laughs, a bright, startled laugh. “Oh my god, I’d forgotten about that.”
It’s such an easy sound. Jane wants to hear it again. “Of course you forgot, you weren’t the one who had to deal with vomit-covered sheets at two in the morning.”
“I would’ve come back to clean up!” There’s a rustle like she’s covering her face but her tone is still too close to laughter to sell the embarrassment, and it's more like the Sophie she remembers than anything she’s seen in the last two days. “Your dorm room bed is not the worst place I’ve thrown up but it is the one I feel worst about. If that’s any comfort at all.”
“Where else have you thrown up that’s worse than through my window?” Jane asks.
The question is knowing bait. Sophie has always loved a good story. She launches into an anecdote involving bad cheesecake, a ten-hour flight, and a copilot that is never going to talk to her again. Somehow this turns into a rundown of a string of awful and unfortunate crew members. She has a knack for bringing back ridiculous stories from a battlefront that cannot be nearly as funny or exciting as she makes it sound. Still, it’s nice to get swept up in the spell.
Jane thinks she falls asleep first. At any rate she doesn’t remember when Sophie stops talking.
When she wakes up, Sophie’s hand has slipped off the couch and is dangling near her face. The sight is captivating, somehow. Her fingers hang in a relaxed curl. Her nails are ragged. With the angle of the early morning light it looks like she’s cupping a shadow in her palm.
Jane gets up as quietly as she can, but Sophie wakes anyway, blinking drowsily at her.
“I have to go to work,” she whispers.
Sophie hasn’t changed out of her loaned shirt as they eat breakfast, and Jane decides to just let her keep it. If what she really needed was a good night of sleep, some food, and a clean shirt—that’s something Jane can easily give.
Sophie doesn’t say where she’s going next but she seems to have a plan, or doesn’t care. At least she’s in good enough condition that Jane doesn’t think she’ll pass out on the sidewalk.
Before she leaves, Jane says, “If you need anything—”
Sophie nods hurriedly.