Work Text:
The alarm ringing woke her abruptly; since they had sent the kids to Earth, she had grown to dread that sound more than anything and she would have said that being woken by it was the worse feeling, until she lifted her eyes to the screen and saw whose wrist band’s signal was disconnected this time.
“No. No,” she said rushing to her feet and approaching the screen. “No. No. No. No,” she repeated as if she could get the transmission terminated sign off her daughter’s picture by the pure strength of her will.
Heart pounding wildly in her chest, fear and desperation knotting her throat, and the deepest grief she had ever felt immediately blurring her vision, Abby tried to stay focused and breathe deeply. There must be a mistake, a malfunctioning code, an error in the data.
“No, this isn’t right.” She was determined to not allow panic to overcome her and find the system failure.
“Abby,” tried Jackson, but she was already writing codes and pulling her daughter’s data from the main computer, hands shaking, heart thumping in her ears, breath hitching. “No,” she kept repeating.
“Abby,” her younger colleague insisted, taking her hand in his this time.
For a second, she felt the floor opening under her feet, the ceiling weighting over her head, the walls closing up around her; but she couldn’t accept it, her baby couldn’t be dead, she couldn’t keep living if she had lost her too. Don’t lose hope, she told herself.
“Okay, it’s not conclusive,” she struggled to say, trying to convince more herself than Jackson. “Just becau …” Her voice was breaking but she wouldn’t let it, she needed to believe, her only child, the only thing she had left couldn’t be gone forever. “Cause her wr … wrist band went out doesn’t mean …” She couldn’t say it, the pain was too great, the fear of making it true by putting it into words unbearable.
She forced herself to take several deep breaths. She had been trying to convince everyone that the termination of the signals didn’t mean the kids were dying, she couldn’t lose it there in the middle of Go-Sci, she needed everyone to remain believing there was still hope.
“Okay,” she kept breathing, trying to regain control of her emotions. “It’s the first terminated signal in over a week,” she said, doing her best to raise her voice so everyone could hear her. “We can still assume that things are stabilizing on Earth. We should assume that.” She nodded and started leaving, it was too hard, too much, she was losing this battle against herself, she needed to be alone, she was breaking and she didn’t want witnesses; she was the tough, strong willed, hopeful Doctor Griffin and she didn’t want anyone to see how much sorrow, turmoil and terror was hidden under her public persona.
“I need an analysis of Clarke’s vital signs for the past two days,” she fought to say, stopping her almost run out at the door frame.
“Abby,” started Jackson but she couldn’t hold the distress under control anymore, she couldn’t argue with him, she needed to leave now.
“Just have it ready for me when I get back,” she managed to say before hurrying out of his sight with a single goal in mind: making it into her quarters crossing paths with as few people as possible.
She didn’t see much of her way there, too occupied trying to keep the tears at bay and her breathing in check for a little longer, a step at a time. She didn’t even attempt to hang on to hope, it was a lost cause now, she was too shaken for hope, she couldn’t even think straight, let alone aim her thoughts to stay over the water; her only option was allowing the groundswell to take her under to then fight to rise stronger.
The violent shaking of her hands was making it impossible to enter her quarters entry code and the little patience in her was vanishing fast.
“Let me do it for you,” she heard a voice murmuring at her ear while a hand steadied hers, taking it away from the code panel. She closed her eyes, leaned slightly back into the comforting body and felt the despair lessen just a little within her; she was going to overcome this, she wasn’t alone.
The overcoming was going to wait for later though, because at the exact moment the door closed behind her, the self-restrain she had imposed herself imploded; her world started spinning; the thumping of her heart in her ears deafened her; the sea of tears biding in her eyes overflowed, blinding her; her hitching breath jammed into her stinging throat; her legs gave up under the weight of her despondency; and her stomach contracted, threatening to empty itself with the impulse of her sobbing.
“Hey, honey,” said Callie, kneeling on the floor and pulling her into her embrace. She let her but didn’t hear a word. “What’s wrong?”
When her friends’ worried question finally reached her brain, Abby didn’t manage to answer right away, nor in the twenty minutes that followed; and when she did, the only reason why Callie understood what she was saying, was because, over the many years of their friendship, she had learned to decipher Abby’s labored and anguished mumbling.
The other thing Callie had gotten to master over time, was the exact course of action that soothed her friend. So she held her, rocked her, stroked her back and hair, and hummed that wordless song she had made up when they were teenagers and Abby’s dad had passed away, the one that she had already found herself repeating in a loop on too many occasions.
As every time so far, Callie’s therapy worked nicely and in no more that two hours Abby was back up in her feet. She still felt broken inside, desperation threatening to overtake her every second, but she had gathered from her friend the strength to keep in place her public persona for the rest of the day.
She was certainly going to need Callie’s company again that night and the ones that would follow until that miracle she was fighting to keep hoping for proved itself true, or if it didn’t, until the throbbing pain in her chest gave way to the dull ache she had been living with for the past few months; exactly as it had been when Jake was floated. But she didn’t need to worry about that because they had always been and will always be there for each other, ready to give anything up when the other was struggling, because their friendship was an unique one, one that maybe sometime, when the pain would settle down, they would be ready and strong enough to explore further.