Work Text:
The hospital reeks of bleach.
Jessica always has the same nightmare. For everything she’s been through, she never wakes up in tears about anything but that hospital. Her nightmares are always that terrible, surreal half-real moment where she hears a passing voice whisper that police officers have recovered some teenagers’ bodies from the mountains.
The voice never tells her who it is. All of the worst parts of Jessica’s nightmare are the moment when she doesn’t know who’s dead and who’s alive, the moment when she realizes that everything she’s lived through isn’t ever going to really be over, that she can’t just go home with all her friends and have everything be normal again.
That darkness of the mines settling in the bottom of her lungs, where it’ll brush against every breath she takes for the rest of her life, an ever-present faint ache where something in her bones set themselves wrong from being yanked out a window and thrown down a mineshaft, strangers recognizing her on the street and TV reporters arguing over what really happened to her friends, all of that will cling to her for years to come.
But in her nightmare, her most terrifying moment is always that panic over where her friends could possibly be, and she always looks to the right of her hospital bed and sees Emily slumped over in a chair.
“Em,” she whispers, never able to help herself. Dream Emily doesn’t lift her head, doesn’t shudder awake like the real one had as soon as she’d heard Jessica’s voice. There’s no relieved sobs, no shared weak giggles at how terrible they both look, and this Emily’s hand doesn’t awkwardly navigate past the presence of an IV and a pulse monitor to hold Jessica’s own.
This Emily is unmoving and still. Jessica hates that the idea of Emily being dead makes her feel worst of all, every time, because how selfish is that, right? When her terror can seize her enough to think that any of her other friends could gone forever, how selfish is she to be a different kind heartbroken at the possibility of losing Emily than she is with Mike or Sam? Jessica is trying to teach herself it’s not a bad thing to feel differently about Emily, and she’s not a bad person for treating her friends differently than she does Emily. But every night, the guilt comes bubbling back up to the surface, and she has to beat it back down with a signal flare again.
There’s a sudden surge of reality that marks this night as different than most of the other ones, because Jessica feels herself blinking awake out of the nightmare long before it’s usually over. Her bedroom is still dark, a string of year-round Christmas lights glowing gently down on her new Ikea furniture, mismatched articles of clothing decorating every surface and forming incomprehensible piles in the near-dark.
Arms are winding around Jessica’s waist and a warm body is curling closer to hers.
“You kicked me in the ass,” Emily groans, and she’s so very real that the smell of the fake hospital vanishes from Jessica’s mind in an instant. Her face is still bleary with sleep, too freshly awake to have wiped the drool from her chin or sculpted her face into anything but the mixture of aggravation and fondness she reserves for her girlfriend’s worst habits, and Jessica wants so badly to kiss her until the sun finally peers through the windows to let them know that they both have to get ready for work.
“Sorry, dream again,” Jessica whispers. She knows Emily will understand, will really get what it means to have to live with what they both do, and having that certainty is enough to make her fingertips go numb with relief.
Never one to let Jessica wallow in loneliness for any longer than she has to, Emily leans in and kisses her. It’s a little bit gross, alarming quantity of drool and early-morning breath considered, but at the same time, the reminder of how much she loves Emily and her girlfriend loves her back is enough to push back the worst of her nightmare’s lingering anxieties to a place they don’t seem as bad and as present. This is a moment for the two of them, not for the two of them and all of Jessica’s worst fears.
They pull apart and look at each other for a few long moments as a cat yowls outside with the clatter of a garbage can.
“Hey, Jess,” Emily says, grin tugging at the corner of her lips.
“Hey, Em,” Jessica answers. Her quiet laughter isn’t any easier to contain.
“Three A.M. pancakes?” Emily asks.
As the two of them shriek at the chill of their tiled kitchen floor and double-, triple-, quadruple-dog-dare each other to venture out of the carpeted living room to turn on the stovetop, Jessica glances sidelong at Emily and finds her looking back.
“I love you,” she says, squeezing Emily’s hand.
Before she can say anything back, Jessica pulls, sending them both stumbling onto the cold tile. Her girlfriend huffs out a breath of laughter and elbows her playfully, making a point to be annoyed without being genuinely annoyed, and without letting go of her hand or backing away.
“That was so unfair,” Emily groans, letting her feet adjust as she rummages for the frying pan. “You’re lucky I love you enough to let it slide.”
Jessica flashes her most shit-eating grin, feeling something wonderfully right unfurl in her heart by having Emily right beside her, and reaches for the chocolate chips.