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Sarah swallows, drags the back ofher hand across her eyes despite knowing it’ll fuck up her eyeshadow, and takes a deep breath, sucks in air hard because her lungs want to work double-time but she can’t let them. She blinks, swimming vision growing clearer, and tries to compose herself before heading down the aisle.
She holds her ticket in her hand and looks up at no one, finds her seat and sighs in relief at the fact that the train is mostly empty and she doesn’t have to sit opposite anybody. She sits, shrugs off her backpack, and leaves it in the seat, too-heavy, and slides into the empty seat next to it. It’s easier than leaving it on the floor – that only means she’ll have to pick it back up again later, and it weighs a fuckton.
Sarah takes another deep and steady breath, feels the wave of emotion recede and leave a tentative calmness in its wake as she turns to look out the window – the conductor has spoken, the train doors have closed, and she settles into her seat as Huxley Station begins to slip away outside in a blur of darkness, concrete, and artificial light.
There are people around her, happy families traveling to happy places. It was something she'd always fought against, getting tangled up in people, but with an hour to kill and suddenly feeling very alone, she thinks of Beth and then Cosima and then S and wishes suddenly, useless and too late, for a hand to hold.
But there is none, and so Sarah satisfies herself with thinking of Beth – strong, mercurial and, lately, there for her.
Beth, her first sister, a status that not even Helena can claim. Sarah reaches out, opens a pocket in her backpack, and takes out headphones, slips her phone out of her jacket pocket and plugs in the jack and places the buds in her ears.
She lets the phone drop to her side, to slide onto the seat, and crosses her arms, stares out the window. There is no music – she wants only to be left alone right now, searching. It’s easier in silence.
There is Beth, of course, always pushing her on. And there is also Katja, who she knew for marginally longer than Beth. Enough to exchange words. At that, Sarah lets out a short bark of laughter, one that must look wildly out of place, scruffy and still a little teary-eyed and staring resolutely at downtown Toronto flying by now.
She’d needed Cosima to explain it to her – she sure as hell hadn’t understood the riddle. Katja she feels more than sees or hears, mostly in the beat of music.
And there are others, too, just like Kira said. Others she doesn’t know. Others she may never know. Sarah closes her eyes. It seems to help, most times.
(She’s tried before, when she was young and high and not allowed near Kira.)
Mum, she thinks, and waits in the dark and the quiet.
(She’d thought it’d been a bunch of bullshit, just her desperately wanting to feel something, that thin golden thread, almost tangible, between her and the tiny little person she’d nurtured within herself for nine months.)
Everyone is different – a hint of a fragrance, the murmur of an accent, a flicker of anger or love or surprise – and even now Sarah’s not quite sure what she’s waiting for. The warmth of a cup of tea cradled between her hands, maybe, or the petal-softness of a kiss to her temple.
(Helena, tired but happy, reassures her it’s not bullshit
)
Mum?
)
and Sarah, holding one of two new Mannings, is inclined to believe her.)
Sarah’s inclined to believe her, and so she sits, hoping.
Kira is with Felix and she misses her, and Fe and Helena and the babies too, of course. Nieces, she still thinks with awe, astounded. She'd forgotten how tiny babies were, and how sharp little nails can be.
But it's not the same, this kind of missing, like she's somehow still walking around with some vital part of her missing.
Nothing comes, and she feels time begin to draw out - the noise of a group of people walking by, talking about something or other, breaks her concentration that was already wavering.
It’s like coming home to an empty house: a still and silent disappointment – the kind she’d steadfastly hardened herself against after the third foster family – made worse by the fact that she’d hoped against hope that it would work.
But it's okay.
Sarah breathes out like Alison's taught her. She’s tired, and it makes sense, and the wave has already washed away all her ability to cry. She’s felt her sisters and her daughter, but never anyone else. It was always unlikely.
She waits another moment, just in case, and thinks love you, just to be sure. She’s never been good at giving up.
And that, Sarah realizes as she opens her eyes, that very same thing that S saw in her, that S tended and nurtured, has her smiling suddenly – albeit watery – and reaching for her phone.
She leaves the headphones in, but picks up her phone, swipes the lock screen open and swallows as she opens her contacts. It’s not her nature, but they’ve all learned to be lots of different things they’ve never been before.
“Oi, Cos,” she says once she hears Cosima pick up, because she knows that that always gets a smile out of the other woman, and she grins at the excitement in Cosima’s voice.
“Hey!” she says. Cosima’s voice over the phone is a pale comparison to the real thing. It’s missing the hands painting a picture in the air, the dreds flying every direction, eyes wide behind glasses, but Sarah chuckles nonetheless. “You headed to Montreal yet?”
“Yeah,” Sarah says, softly, and settles back into her seat.
They talk until, swayed by the train's movements and the hour, she begins to nod off about an hour later (she’d be proud of you and I’m proud of you and text me when you get to your hotel), and they finally hang up.
Sarah, drowsy, tucks her phone safe into her bag and reaches up, pulls the jacket's hood over her head, turns into the fabric the still smells of S’s soap, and lets herself fall asleep.