Work Text:
Anissa has known loss before. The loss of allies, of people she failed to save. All the times she thought she'd lost one of the people closest to her. The loss of little pieces of herself, her family, the more things changed, tearing them away from whatever they used to be.
Losses sustained and infinite, losses that turned out not to be losses at all, small and gigantic and everything in between.
She hasn't learned this loss, though. The slow one that burns away at her soul, because it's so unknowable. The way she sits at Grace's bedside day by day, not knowing if anything will change. Unable to leave, to move on, because she hasn't lost her entirely, not yet (not ever, she prays), but she's lost her for now. For a period of time that's terrifying because it's indefinite.
She doesn't know when or if or how Grace will come back to her, and they've lost months, almost a year, into those cracks of suspended time.
Months of watching the stillness of Grace's face, wishing she would open her eyes, frown, smile, anything but this... absence.
Months of trying everything she can to help her, of watching her mom try the same, endlessly, of both of them failing, time and time again.
Months of holding her hand tight and willing her, baby, give me a sign, please.
Months they could have, should have been able to spend together, getting married, going on a honeymoon, starting the next phase of their lives together, joyful, not like this. Never like this.
Anissa doesn't want to call it a loss, because Grace isn't gone, and she won't give up on her, she'll never give up. But it feels like one, these weeks and days slipping away, a whole damn year without her smile and her touch and her strength when they fight and her jokes about liberating Anissa's smart home. A whole year with only memories and molecules and her still face.
It's hard, to live without her, and Anissa won't even think about the idea of doing that forever, because if she thinks about that then she won't be able to go on. She's lost enough as it is, trying to live some type of a life this way. She moves Grace's stuff into storage because she can't take looking at it all the time, and then she misses it once it's gone because it feels like she's lost another piece of her.
So she redoes the loft to fit her own vibe and pretend she's okay like this, living alone, working alone, but she's not even kidding herself, still less anyone else. She can see the concern in their faces, her mom, her sister, and she tells them she's fine, but they all know it's a lie.
Still, she'd take a thousand years of this loss over a permanent ending.
So she sits at Grace's bedside and watches her face and holds on to her hand and tells her she's still here, she's still waiting. Tells her she can handle anything, that this year they've lost won't even matter, if Grace comes back to her, if she opens her eyes.
Tells her I love you, I love you, I love you, and hopes the words can do something, anything, to bring her back.