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You’d think that it would hurt, but really it doesn’t. Sarah leaves the DYAD building, shoves her gun in her pocket and sheds Cosima’s coat and runs into the dark – the streetlight-flicker, the headlight-glare – and then she just. Does it. She rips out part of her soul in the dark. She says: please. She says: I know I meant it, but I don’t mean it anymore.
Miles and miles away – not as far as Sarah would like her to be, or maybe too far – Helena wakes up on a warehouse floor. Everything hurts. She breathes in
and Sarah breathes out, and then Sarah breathes in, and she doesn’t feel any different. She can feel the ragged edges of where half her soul used to be, like prodding at the fringed edges of her gum after losing a tooth, but she doesn’t feel hollow. She doesn’t feel Helena anywhere out there, breathing out or breathing in.
Alright, she thinks to herself. She empties all the bullets out of the gun and they fall in bright pings to the sidewalk. She heads to Art’s building, because – what else does she do, with all this weight.
--
Sarah dreams about a hospital room, but she isn’t sure if that’s truth or guilt.
--
Sarah dreams about a farm, when she’s sleeping at Cal’s cabin; she dreams like it’s underwater, the weight of what used to be her soul bobbing inside of Helena’s chest. It’s growing, she can tell – given space to breathe it’s putting down roots, it’s growing buds like a tree. It could be beautiful there.
Outside the windows, the trees are starting to shed snow. Outside of Cal’s cabin all the trees are in bloom. Sarah and Kira play cards on the table and inside her chest her soul is stretching out to fill the space. She’s dreaming about Helena, and it could be true, and it could just be that she wants—
That. She wants Helena lying in bed, dreaming, her dress white and the sheets white and her breathing slow and even.
--
Only Helena comes back. Dress-all-red. Sarah screams but doesn’t mean it. She means it, but then she doesn’t mean it anymore. Helena cuts her down from the showerhead. Sarah crumples and Sarah reaches out her hand and puts it to Helena’s chest and can’t feel it, can’t feel anything but skin underneath her hand.
“You were dead,” she says again.
Helena sucks in a breath. “You did this for me,” she says.
“You were dead,” Sarah says, the were falling out too heavy, the dead on stumbling feet. Outside of Rachel’s apartment she can hear the hush-whisper of the city, but it’s so quiet. Like there’s nothing real in the world but the two of them; she can hear her own soul growing, filling the empty spaces in Helena’s chest.
Helena says: “I dreamed about you.”
--
Sarah dreams that she is in a tent with Sarah. Sarah dreams that her sister holds out her hand and she takes it and she falls and she is holding her sister’s hand and her sister falls and between her ribs she is blooming, flowers exploding into colors she has no name for yet.
--
She wakes up in the tent. Helena is sitting up, and looking at Sarah. She says: “You did this to me.”
“For you,” Sarah says, sitting up.
“No,” Helena says.
“I’m changing,” Helena says.
“I don’t want to,” Helena says. “You did this to me.”
She puts her hand up against her ribs. Inside of her Sarah’s soul grows wild and hungry and blooming.
--
The next morning Helena sings along to the radio and smiles and laughs. Her smile is a mouthful of white teeth – a girl in a white dress in white sheets on a white bed, so still, her breathing exactly the way Sarah would want it to be.
Sarah used to want a sister, sometimes. Just to fill the space. She imagined her the way that Sarah couldn’t be: shining.
The song ends. Helena stares out the window. They’re driving so fast by all the trees, and outside winter is turning into spring, and inside and outside everything’s blooming. Sarah’s soul is settling into all the places she’d left open for it between her ribs, but Sarah is still the same. It’s just more of the person that she was. It isn’t a new weight stretching her chest wide open wrong.
--
Asleep in Felix’s bed, Sarah dreams that she is bundled on a military plane. She dreams there is an animal inside of her chest, and it has all these teeth, and it wants out of her or maybe it just wants to be her. Her breath steams in front of her on the plane. She doesn’t know who she is anymore; she thinks she left herself behind when she stood up and left her sister behind asleep in Felix’s bed. She wanted to leave her. Maybe. Maybe she didn’t. An animal in her chest made of thorns and vines and flowers. It’s eating her. She’s eating it. They love each other, they do,
except she wakes up.
--
They sit on opposite sides of the wall in the prison camp. Sarah still can’t feel her soul. But: it isn’t really hers anymore, is it. It’s grown. She and Helena used to be the same and then they grew apart. She can’t even feel the place where she ripped part of herself out anymore.
“I made a mistake, didn’t I,” she says to the iron grate between them.
“I don’t know,” Helena says. “I don’t know anymore. Part of me says yes but I don’t know if that’s the part of me that is me or the part of me that is you. I don’t know which one of us is madder at you. Or which one of us loves you more. I don’t remember who I was before you gave me you.”
“You weren’t happy,” Sarah says. She picks at her fingers, tries to convince herself. “You were angry, and scared, and—”
“And I deserved to die.”
Sarah doesn’t say anything, which means: yes.
“And now,” Helena says. “I don’t deserve to die. Because I have part of you. And that makes me okay.”
Sarah keeps on not saying yes. On the other side of the wall she hears Helena shift, but she doesn’t know what direction she’s moving anymore.
--
Sarah dreams—
--
They sit at dinner. Helena is wearing a pink shirt and a pink hat and the set of her shoulders is soft. She looks like roses and cream. She looks like the sort of meat an animal would eat. When she asks for the sugar, Sarah passes it to her. It’s easy. Helena sprinkles sugar on all her food. Her face says nothing at all.