Fics like in your absence

Cassie has this awful fleeting image of her lying there, stunned not by the pain itself but by the realization that getting back up was going to take a kind of effort she just didn’t know she had anymore. The thought hurts. More than Cassie expects it to. Because Dana should never have had to absorb that moment alone. Because someone should have protected her. Because it suddenly feels obscene that people like Dana spend decades holding emergency departments together with sheer will and sacrifice only to eventually become vulnerable inside the exact systems they’ve carried for years. Cassie wishes, fiercely and irrationally, that she could take the fear out of her entirely. Or: in the weeks after the assault, Cassie wonders if Dana will truly come back. If there's no other way to be certain, she guesses she'll just have to start checking in on her herself.

Fics like in your absence

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