it'll be okay
2039.
(The First Light: Sabine and Yunhua are married. Yunhua now works for Kingdom.)
“You're picking at your food." calls out Yunhua, pointing at her child's plate with a spatula. “You know the hello kitty gets mad if you leave all that food covering up her face."
“Is something the matter...? Does your tooth hurt?" asks Sabine, work outfit already on, yawning into her phone as she types a response to an email. Her wife scurries over and sets a cup of coffee next to her plate.
“I knew you shouldn't have pulled it out so harshly," chastises Yunhua, turning to Sabine.
"Is not my tooth at all!” pouts their child, indignant. And then all shy all at once: “Actually I had something I was thinking I wanted to tell you guys maybe..."
Sabine lifts an eyebrow, setting down her phone. “Which is...?"
The kid always falls for that. Yunhua calls it ‘too intimidating,’ but Sabine's not sure how... It's just eyebrows.
“Ah—It's just that I think I'm maybe a boy..."
A pause descends over the kitchen. For a moment all the light that flows through the curtain stills to a gentle heart, shining with splendor, the specks of dust floating about, Yunhua's and Sabine's breaths held in altogether, understanding, and so warm. This moment, something wonderful.
“Oh." The two murmur in unison. The clock starts winding again, gently and softly.
“Does that... disappoint you...?" Poor kid, he's starting to tear up a little.
“No—!" yelps Yunhua.
“…No, Of course not." she repeats, gentler this time.
“We love you," reassures Sabine, getting up to hold her wife's shoulders, because she looks like she’s shaking more than the kid is. “We love you. So much."
Sabine feels the shards of glass at the pit of her stomach, lodged so deep that she'd not even realized they were still even there, start to mend themselves.
She'd felt safe with Yunhua and their child these past few years, but she hadn't once dared to think that her newfound happiness had repaired anything, made up for anything. But maybe, just maybe, she thinks she could come to let herself believe she’s in a place where nothing ever has to hurt like that, ever again.
Yunhua turns, looking into Sabine's eyes with love and understanding and memories and concern and she's giving her everything.
She's already given her everything, really. Sabine thinks she's going to be really not okay.
Yunhua has the back of her warm hands at Sabine's cheek before she's even realized she's crying.
“It's okay, love." whispers Yunhua. “You can let it out."
Their son just stares at them with his little plastic Sanrio cutlery, confused. “Guys, are you okay?”
Sabine clears her throat. “I'm—hem—just proud of you. I promise. You're amazing. I—" Her usual cool-parent airs are a little fallen apart.
“Your name—!" Yunhua chimes in, helpfully. “Have you thought about if you want us to call you something different or not?"
“Mmm...”
The kid thinks about it.
“I like Freddy. Freddy’s cool. I like Johnny, too, though...” the boy prattles on. “And Channing? I never knew that was a name…”
Sabine shoots a quick, alarmed glance at her wife. Are we really gonna let our kid call himself Freddy? Like Krueger?
Hua meets her gaze for the fraction of a second and squinches her nose, eyes flitting as she furiously motions for her to look back at their son. Don’t look at me now, stupid, pay attention to the kid—
—Like Fazbear???
“You can have any name you want, darling,” Yunhua says, gently, but with a snap in her voice clearly directed at her idiot wife. “As many as you’d like, whenever, for whatever reason. Just be sensible, but I don’t need to tell you that, angel.”
She pats his head.
“For now I think I like my name." The kid shines a bright smile, his front teeth missing and all, eyes still glistening, blissfully unaware of Sabine’s sigh of relief heard around the room. "Jamie can be a boys' name, right? There's a boy Jamie in my new class. My teacher gets us confused and says we act the same."
“Well, that's stupid." comments Sabine, having regained some composure, sitting herself back down at the table and spreading some habanero cream cheese on her bagel. “No way the teacher can't tell the difference between our precious little angel and some cisgender bastard child."
“Your language—" snaps Yunhua. She seats herself with a grilled cheese sandwich next to Jamie, planting a peck on the top of his head.
“But yeah," she agrees, pouting. “I'm sure our Jamie is a million times more precious, aren’t you, sweetheart?"
“Actually my teacher calls us two little monsters.”
Sabine looks up from her bagel with a deadpan. “We need to find out more about this other Jamie."
Her wife nods, a cold, dead seriousness settling over her expression. “Agreed."
Jamie peeks over at Sabine inquisitively with those big gentle blue eyes. “Mom, what's a cis?"
The two moms share a look.
“Nothing you've got to worry about right now, baby," coos Yunhua. "Sabine, give Liam a call, will you? Do you mind if we tell Uncle Liam, Jamie?"
“Not at all!"
And when Jamie smiles, Sabine thinks it’s everything in the world.
“Sabine, where the hell were you?”
When Sabine picks up the phone, flooded with unintelligible notifications it is far too late. “I was at the lab. What’s going on??”
Liam’s voice is struck with an uncharacteristic sense of urgency. “You need to come right now to the medical wing, it… there was… a car and…”
His usually firm and reassuring voice breaks. “It’s your son.”
The clattering of hurried footsteps. Sabine scrunches up her labcoat—restricting her motion—and throws it into a trash can being rolled along by a janitor down the hall of the medical wing. She misses.
“OUTTA THE WAY!!! "
She’s pretty sure she shoves some kid with crutches aside. She doesn’t care. The path from Kingdom’s chemical engineering department to the medical wing is a winding maze of ups and downs and twists and turns which frustrates Sabine to no end. Fuck this building. Sabine wonders if it’ll be too difficult to slam her body through the turn of this hallway. Goddammit, she’s not thinking straight. She needs to get there. Room 327. Where the fuck is room 327—
The door is flung open, accompanied by a guttural, wretched cry of pain that hacks up Sabine’s lungs in a way that can be only described as animalistic.
“JAMIE—” Sabine hacks out, only to meet the eyes of a startled nurse tidying up an empty bed.
What.
Sabine strides up to the nurse and grabs him by the collar. She all but shouts, derangedly:
“There’s supposed to be a kid here. There’s supposed to be a kid and his mom. Where are they.”
“I—if you’re looking for the patient,” The nurse gulps, his pupils quivering, and it takes some time for him to get out the words, as if he’s afraid to say the wrong thing. “They’re—um.”
Sabine’s grip on the nurse’s collar slacks as she recognizes his voice. “You’re Yunhua’s assistant. Why are you here, cleaning this up. Where is she.”
“Um—” the assistant’s voice breaks, “The patient is under special resuscitation with Dr. Sen in R-08α.”
R-08α. That’s not a medical wing room number.
That’s the Radianite labs.
Special—
Sabine’s heart seems to stop.
Half-formed words and feelings and images fly by so quickly and crash against each other as they come in the forefront of Sabine’s mind. Before she’s formed a single coherent thought, she finds herself swiping down her access key to lab R-08α, all but unhinging the bolted-down steel doors as she busts through.
When the door swings back closed with an earth-shuddering groan, she finds the laboratory all dark, save for the glow of a single lightbulb past the observation glass. No sound can be heard besides the the familiar low hum of superconducting electromagnets, the occasional clattering of stainless steel tools against hurried fingers.
“Yunhua—” cries out Sabine, her heart frighteningly slow and slack as she rushes into the lab, a tingling cold that numbs the tip of her fingers, her breathing rough, her forehead slick with cold sweat. “Yun—”
She chokes. Her pace trickles to a halt as she leans an arm against the observation deck to catch her breath. The air in here is cold and heavy. Fumes of chilled nitrogen gas whip up at her feet.
A cough scrapes sharply from the back of her throat, her tears clawing their way into her lungs. A looseness in her sinus. Cold, slow trickles roll down down her chin from her eyes and nose and the corner of her lips. She cups her mouth with her hand, and when she wipes away the choked-back tears, it smears stickily and dryly on the bridge of her nose.
Dry?
She looks down at her own hands to find darkened blood, already sticking from the chilled air of the laboratory.
The whirring of slowing motors. The clacking of the doorknob. The fluorescent lights flicker on, blue and lifeless. Dr. Sen emerges from the observation room. She nudges her mask off her ears, her gloves stained black with something that looks like tar. She wipes her forehead with the exposed skin on the back of her wrists.
The clattering of a scalpel when their eyes meet.
“Sabine.” she whispers, like a burglar that’s been caught.
Sabine opens her mouth to speak. A thousand words could clatter out, but with the cold air it’s difficult to even breathe.
Why?
Why did all this need to happen?
What is happening?
“Jamie.” she finally asks.
A sharp breath, and in that briefest second, longing, hurt, anguish, grief, accusation, disappointment, love. “What… did you do.”
The chemist thinks she feels her fingertips freeze over in the few moments the doctor lets slip away into the silence cast thickly between the two of them.
After a stilted pause, the doctor attempts to smile, meekly. “Sabine, I…”
The rustling of scrubs and the clacking of footsteps as the distance is closed, and the taller woman grabs her by the collar with both hands and violently slams the shorter woman against the wall.
“What. did. you. do.”
The doctor bleeds, too, from the corner of her upturned lips. Her cheeks are stained with splatters of blood and a slick, black grime, which seems to smolder and writhe in the fluorescent lights. The shimmering in her eyes shimmer as they anxiously flit away from meeting the chemist’s gaze.
“I. I’m going to save him.” she admits, quietly. “I can save him.”
“But they said it was instant. I heard on the phone it was instant.”
The doctor is silent.
Their slow, hurt, breathing fog up in little curls, and so do the warmth radiating off the tears on their cheeks.
“Yunhua,” the chemist begs with her broken throat, her lover’s name all at once an apology, a confession, a threat. “Please tell me they were wrong.”
“…”
“Please.”
“It—It’ll be okay. He’s going to be okay.”
Heavy breathing. A whisper.
“Yunhua. Did our son—”
The lights reflected in the doctor’s eyes are far away.
She swallows.
She nods.
“And you…? Did you….”
She nods again.
“I see.”
“Sabine…”
“I’m disappointed in you,” mutters the chemist, disbelief and disgust and anger and anguish all numb at the cold tingling of her fingertips. “I can’t believe you’d do this to us.”
“You didn’t answer—” the doctor manages to splutter out, “I called you, and you didn’t answer—”
“I didn’t answer and WHAT?” The chemist snaps, shoving the doctor into the metal walls again, the reverberation fraying the numbness in her knuckles into electric shocks that stab into her flesh like scalpels. “It’s my fault you’re playing Frankenstein with our son’s corpse? Christ, Yunhua, I thought I—”
"Well," Yunhua snaps back in a spark of anger. "If you'd been more attentive to us—"
A clasping of hands over her mouth, the clattering of the scalpel. A drop in the atmosphere like a rollercoaster.
"...What did you say?"
It's too late. "No, I didn't mean that. Sabine, I didn't mean—"
A sob that curls at the back of her throat as the tears logged up in her sinus collapses into her vocal cords.
“I thought I—fucking—knew you.” she continues, her throat aching, the cold air like razorblades against her bleeding windpipes, spilling bitterness into her whispered voice. “I trusted you. I thought you would have the basic fucking decency to know that this isn’t something you get to fuck over for us. And you blame me? You blame me for what? For this? If I'd been more attentive to you then the fucking car—”
“I—I didn’t—” the doctor’s voice spills out in bursts of stuttered breathing, swallowing heavy gasps of air as she sputters out excuses that fall apart at the seams. “I wasn’t thinking and I—”
“And you what—you played god and desecrated our son’s body? You knew you can’t—you knew you shouldn’t—”
Something breaks and coils in the chemist’s stomach, driving her into a coughing fit that seems to tear her lungs open. Blackened blood splatters on the floor.
The chemist’s grip of the doctor’s collar slacks. The doctor crumples to the floor, her breathing rapid and sharp, her legs and her words spent.
“Sabine…”
The chemist wretches.
This isn’t important.
This isn’t the time to be doing this.
Their son. They’ll never see their son again. They’ll never get to see their son smile again. Their son will never get to grow up, he’ll never get to try on all those names he wanted to try on, he’ll never get to learn to drive or be stressed about school or sneak away from home to hang out with his friends and he’ll never get to complain about his mothers’ horrible music taste and their god-awful cooking—
The chemist, her head foggy and heavy, her hands jittering, fumbles for the doorknob.
“Sabine… I’m sorry… I’m sorry…”
The chemist doesn’t stay to listen. She makes to swing past the door.
“No…” The doctor breathes harshly and painfully, arms reaching out, and her words are interrupted by the sharp stinging in her ribs, which had broken in no less than two places when she was shoved against the wall. “No—Sabine—wait—”
The door is unlocked with a heavy click when the lights flicker out. The whirring of the motors slow. Past the observation glass, the emergency light lights again, only to burn searingly bright and pop and shatter over Jamie’s lifeless body.
“What—”
All sound disappears.
Sabine feels her chest collapsing as all the air in the room simply vanishes. Her voice is lost with her breath, and the deafening, high-pitched screeching of tinnitus and the rushing of her blood to her head overwhelms any thought she can put together.
Heavy, heavy pressure tugs against her eardrums, which cave and pop and burst. Sabine feels fluid and blood spill and slide stickily along the curls of her ears.
She blinks, and for a second, a searing explosion of light past the observation window, followed by three pulses of energy which seem to plunge the world into deeper and deeper darkness each time which send glass shrapnel flying against Sabine’s arms and face, and one huge shard of reinforced glass takes a chunk out of the side of her stomach. And then—
It all slows. The shards of glass, the smoke, the rushing of blood and the frenzied pounding against the base of her skull, suspended in midair.
And it all comes careening down as gravity multiplies twelvefold. The ceiling starts to shudder and cave, small cracks forming overhead, trickling dust, and soon plunging in clumps of concrete and rubble that start to—and when the reds and blues of emergency lights finally start to splash against the dark walls of the laboratory—
Through the tinnitus and her broken eardrums, she thinks she hears Yunhua scream, from far, far, away, through churning veils of ocean and space and wind, not from her ears, but reverberating at the base of her skull—
Sabine!
A hunk of concrete falls on the back of her head.
When she wakes, it’s to the trickling of warm rain against the base of her neck.
The wind blows. She finds herself looking sky. The sun hangs overhead in clear skies, which burn red like the sunset. There are no signs of stormclouds. The rain continues to splash against her skin, but its trails are dry.
Her hearing still gone, and the ringing in her ears ever-present, she shrugs off the piles of rubble which have somehow fallen around her, and not on top of her, and she painfully stumbles to her feet.
She falls. A faint lightness swims her vision, spotting it with stars.
Her son. That’s all she remembers. Her son is somewhere in this rubble, she thinks. She has to—before she loses him forever.
Cold hands grab her own.
She turns to look.
The doctor, her scrubs pinned under a block of rubble, had reached out as far as she could to stop her from walking away. Her tears trickle, mixing with the acid rain and hissing with steam at her cheeks, plastered with concrete dust.
Don’t go, she seems to mouth, her lips beaten and swollen, spilling blood. I…
Her lips seem to falter on their own.
The chemist pulls away.
The doctor doesn’t resist.
You wake up to a strange and unfamiliar world.
A steady, deafening, and painful pounding against your head makes hard to focus. Your thoughts are like fumes scattered in the wind.
There’s little feeling. You’re not sure if you have a body. You try to talk, and you find that you have a maw that opens up like a deep chasm, and when you can’t find the words your throat your throat is dried out and sore with the taste of dust and blood the base of your tongue.
…Jamie…?
A voice. It sounds so distant that at first you thought it was coming from inside of you.
And then, sensation. The grazing of cold fingers along a cheek—your cheek. You have a cheek, and along it, touch. You find your eyes.
You open your eyes to a sky that’s red and dim.
Staring at you are beautiful green eyes which glisten in tears, wide open with shock.
She… you…
The lady chokes and fumbles with her words.
I’m sorry. I’m sorry…
Why is she sorry?
Then you suddenly feel sick. Your internal compass starts spinning out, and you thrash violently in the woman’s arms, breaking free and falling, meeting cold, hard pavement, and you wretch. You wretch and wretch, expelling black sludge and bile and blood and you think you might be losing yourself? The way with every wretch you feel as more of your thoughts and feelings are spilt out… You think you taste bits of yourself, maybe it’s your brain, now piles of muck which fall along the bristles of your tongue and it tastes like sand and mud and it smells like gasoline.
Jamie!
Where am I..?
You feel heavy, stuttered, but warm breathing on you.
Who am I…?
Jamie…?
You are picked up and held gently, still facing the pavement. The voice is so familiar. You feel warm tears fall on your back.
Jamie. You’re Jamie.
You hear her heart break when she says your name.
You ask her who she is.
…
You ask again, more insistently.
…
She hesitates.
…Sabine. she says, eventually. I’m Sabine.
She sounds unsure. You think the name sounds strange, but her voice is still so familiar. You ask again, just to make sure, if she really is Sabine.
Sabine breathes.
And then she nods.
I’m…
…A friend.
When she unlocks the door, tosses off her shoes, and stumbles through the hall into the kitchen it’s like any other day. The bowl of Jamie’s half-eaten cereal from this morning she’d been too lazy to clean up before leaving for work is still sitting there like nothing happened. She places the bowl in the sink and flips up the tap for a brief second to let its contents soak. She gives her hands a quick, cold, rinse.
Police sirens blare in the distance.
She shakes the water off her fingertips. Tired, she makes her way upstairs to the bedroom, and like any other day, she mindlessly, yet lovingly, brushes the back of her hands along the pictures of her family hung by the stairwell as she climbs upstairs.
She neatly folds her clothes and leaves them atop the drawer—maybe they need a wash, she thinks; a problem for another time—before she slips into her usual evening dress. Like any other day, she slips into the left side of the bed, making sure to tuck herself in tightly, and clicks open her phone.
No notifications. She smiles at the picture of her wife getting pelted with a jet of water at a waterpark. The clock reads 2 in the morning.
Strange. She looks out the window. The horizon still burns a searing golden red, dotted with flocks of pigeons, wandering the sky in all different directions as though they’re lost. The sun is nowhere to be seen.
But besides that, it’s still like any other day, where nothing out of the ordinary seems to have happened.
So why are Yunhua’s cheeks streamed with tears that just won’t stem?
She scrunches her blankets, smearing them, like everything else she’s touched, leaving them caked and sticky and stained with blood and sweat and a slick, shiny black substance that just won’t come off, no matter how hard she tries to wash it out.
And for a second she thinks that she might feel her heart pounding out of her chest, her blood rushing to her ears and the world faint and wispy, feeling in her chest and throat seizing up frozen and numb and sharp like static.
She breathes. She breathes slowly, and shakily.
And in another second, the world is calm and quiet, the reds of the sky and the sirens all distant, her skin flush with feeling, and she falls asleep, her arms cradling a pillow that still smells like Sabine where Jamie usually sleeps, now stained with blood and sludge, wondering if she even has a heart at all.