Rose’s eyes flutter open to the sound of a heart monitor and the sight of a featureless white ceiling. Fluorescent lights, diaphanous curtains, everything crisp and clean.

A hospital?

Wait, this doesn’t seem right, she thinks. When she closed her eyes, she was dramatically lingering about her bedroom at home. She’d just taken a handful of pills, and said goodbye to...

She shoots up in bed, tugging the IV taped under her elbow. Kanaya is sitting at her bedside, hemming a sundress. She thins her lips and gives Rose a half-lidded look.

This is the sort of joke that would have gone over better if it had not been made at this exact moment. With all the distance between them lately, Kanaya’s jab lands like a rock plunging into a stagnant pond.

Instinctively, Rose raises her hand to her forehead, but there’s no pain there. Her head is the clearest it’s been in months.

Kanaya throws her sewing project aside and sweeps in close, wrapping a cool palm around Rose’s arm. Her voice quakes but retains most of its porcelain decorum.

Rose considers this for a very long time, eyes fixed on the window at the other end of the room. The night is dying behind the thin, pale curtain. She can barely see the moon.

She looks back to Kanaya, eyes wide and bright.

It’s been such a long time since she’s felt anywhere in the same ballpark as “fine” that it’s almost an out-of-body experience to say the word. She feels giddy.

Rose shuts her eyes and takes a deep breath. For some reason, she’s never felt so relieved in her life. She thinks about what she was about to send John off to do, and her feelings of grim urgency surrounding the matter. And yet, for the life of her, she can’t bring herself to care about whatever it was she felt was so direly important about his decision. All that matters to her now is that he’s safe, in good health, and spending time with those he cares about. And apparently, due to a perfectly inexplicable turn of events, so is she.

The door to the room creaks open, and in slips a smiling carapacian in blue scrubs. Rose listens to Kanaya ask fretful questions about her condition. The nurse responds by tapping her clipboard in a musical rhythm.

Rose opens her eyes. She stares at the knob of her wrist and frowns. She’s not sure why this sensation should be concerning. It’s not like her memory is slipping away. She remembers the conversation she had with John this morning quite clearly. As she does the previous years of declining health, and troubled, obsessive thoughts about canon, dissipation, and other such abstractions. What’s slipping away instead is the feeling that any of it mattered at all. Was she insane to be so consumed by such lofty concerns, and is she only beginning to experience clarity today, for the first time in ages?

When the nurse leaves, Kanaya puts a hand over the wrist that she is so preoccupied with.

Kanaya tips her face away from the light to hide it in the curve of her shoulder. Rose reaches out and takes her wife’s hands in her own. They’re colder than she remembers.

Kanaya’s lips twitch into a smile and she laughs, sadly. Her laughter forces the tears out. They drip down her perfectly made-up face in thick trails.

Kanaya laughs again. Gaily this time, as if some terrible, dark weight has been lifted from her shoulders. She lets out a thin, shaky breath afterward. It’s like the noise fills the room back up with oxygen. Rose hadn’t realized that she’d held her breath at all; the shadow hanging over Kanaya’s thoughts was hanging over hers as well. But now that she’s said it aloud, the darkness dissipates without ever materializing into its true shape.

Rose uses the hem of her hospital gown to wipe the tears off Kanaya’s face.

Kanaya presses a snotty, uncharacteristically imperfect kiss to the back of Rose’s hand, right beneath where she wears her wedding ring.

They smile at each other as the first rays of the sunrise peek through the blinds.