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It's been so hard. Your teammate crashed and you know she'd want you to stay positive, keep making your stupid jokes, keep believing she'll be okay.
And if she's not okay, then, well, that's okay.
But it's not okay. It's really fucking not okay, and you've been too scared to think the thought outright but she might not wake up.
You go to see her any day you get the chance. You try just talking to her, just joking like you used to, just pretending she'd be laughing if she could.
She doesn't smile. You didn't stay at her house often but you've seen her sleeping a few times, and she's almost always smiling.
She's not now. There's just this… blankness. There's nothing. When you first saw her like this you thought maybe if you nudged her just so she might sort of shift and tell you she was tired, just a bit longer, Dave, it was a late night.
That first time you saw her, you waited until the two of you were alone, and you shook her arm. She didn't stir. "Hey 'Radia," you'd murmured, quietly, like if you said it too loudly she would startle awake, and you didn't want that. "Aradia. Come on, girly, you can do this."
You'd waited for a while.
She hadn't moved.
"Fuck, come on, you didn't even crash that hard, wake up." When this did nothing, you shoved at her shoulder, and her head lolled limply to one side.
You had managed to stop crying before anyone came back. You weren't sure why you were crying, really. She would be fine, you only cried when things got really bad. This wasn't that bad yet. And it wouldn't be. She just needed a nice long nap and a chance to heal, and one day you'd come in here and she'd be giving you a tired smile, and a "Sorry to keep you waiting."
Whenever something like this happened before she had always said, "It'll be alright, Dave. If it doesn't work out the way we want, that's okay. We can work with it."
So you're trying to make this okay. You know it's what she'd want. But it's not really okay, it hurts, and there's that thing nagging at the back of your mind going "what if," but you don't want to think about that.
Visiting hours are over soon, so you quit moping and squeeze her hand. "You're gonna be fucking gorgeous when you wake up after all this beauty sleep," you tell her, joking, and you try to remember what she looks like when she smiles.