Sam shifted her weight again, trying to settle on the still-unfamiliar mattress. Sure, it was a damn sight better than a cot or bedroll, but it wasn't their positively decadent pillow-top back home. That was a bitch to get up four flights of stairs but so worth it every night since. And baby, mama misses you dearly at the moment.

Now that she wasn't fatigued to the bone anymore, and was still away from ample charging infrastructure that let her stay up until all hours, her night owl inclinations were driving her nuts too. All this "going to bed because it had been dark for a while" stuff, feh.

Another hour of Chrissie's guitar and some reading while Rebecca joined the card game at the table was a pleasant enough evening. Snuggling under the covers for a while had been nice. But now the two of them were individually trying to get comfortable, quietly and intermittently chatting in the dim flickering glow from the stove.

She rolled onto her side to face Rebecca. "What do you think will happen when Rufus and Sue meet?"

"Hmm, heh." Rebecca's voice came back, soft and cozy so nearby while the firelight illuminated only one edge of her face. "I think that will be an interesting day, somehow. Usually the stray cats back home take off long before he even sees them."

"What about Sue's history with dogs?"

Rebecca shrugged, shifting the covers — which Sam pulled back up over Rebecca before she'd even lifted a hand. "Aww, thanks, even though you're probably doing that just so I have more heat to steal. Nothing conclusive with Sue either, if you skip the time I went into the water after him."

"Great. That was running from a dog?"

"After he'd slapped it around a little, yeah."

Sam chuckled. "He does seem a little pernicious sometimes. I wonder who started it, maybe he deserved a little dip." Rebecca started to protest, but Sam stopped her. "I know, I know. But you didn't. Pobrecita..."

"Hrmph."

Her offense was clearly feigned, so Sam slipped her fingertips into the sleeve of the baggy t-shirt Rebecca was wearing, tracing them around the scars Sue had left years before. "I could kiss it and make it better, but your pesky clothing is in the way."

"Is that why you were trying to keep me warm? So you can get my clothes off?"

Sam chuckled and withdrew her hand, picking up on Rebecca's absent enthusiasm and backing off. "I mean, that's not the only reason. I can be selfish and care about you at the same time."

"Uh-huh." Rebecca leaned closer to kiss Sam tenderly, but not provocatively for a few seconds and then settled on her pillow again. "I'm sorry. I'm just not in as good a place as I was last night."

"You don't have to apologize, sugar. And, I mean that separately from the usual lecturing. Do you think... whatever you want to call your mom's thing will work?"

Rebecca sighed. "I dunno. I mean, I'll take anything I can to put in the toolbox, right, Miss Engineer? One more thing I can try."

"Mmm." They were both quiet for a while, maybe finally getting closer to sleep, but Sam could still tell that Rebecca was awake when an idea came to her. "Hey, maybe we can find a pharmacy that wasn't totally trashed, or a warehouse. And I bet drug dealers probably scooped up all the Xanax they could find, along with Vicodin and Oxy. Or that someone's got a big pot farm going somewhere."

"Maybe. I guess I wouldn't have to worry about losing my fucking license."

Sam frowned. "Huh. Last I heard they were going to repeal that shit? Massachusetts allowed medical and dropped small possession to a fine."

"Mm-mmm. Didn't go through that year."

"Huh. Well, guess it doesn't matter anymore."

It took a few seconds for Rebecca to reply and her words were starting to slur, which Sam knew meant she was close to drifting off. "Lotta that going 'round."

Sam fumbled for her hand and squeezed it. "This still does. And we found your mom."

Rebecca let out a sleepy but happy sigh. "Yeah."

It wasn't long before Rebecca was snoring slightly, and Sam held onto her hand the whole time. She was glad to have managed getting Rebecca to think of something positive right before dropping off. It didn't do her any good though.

Sam lay there for at least another half hour, wondering if this was going to be another one of those lovely "can't sleep because she's pissed that she can't sleep" nights. She never thought she'd miss the late hours in the workshop, but at least it had lights that would last the night and she could entertain herself. Eh. What I have now is worth it. Still. Fucking insomnia. Also, I'm the one who gets teased about snoring, huh?

Sam let go when Rebecca rolled over in her sleep. After another unknown drag of time, she let out a disgruntled sigh, carefully edged out from under the blankets, and hopped over the footboard to exit around her. Getting up and moving a bit sometimes helped her reset, maybe she'd get a drink in the kitchen and hope Sue was prowling around for a little Calvin n' Hobbes "fuzz therapy".

A flashlight on the table glinted with enough reflection from the fire that she scooped it up without any clatter, but she still paused a moment and glanced down Rebecca's shadowy lump. She seemed peaceful, which warmed Sam's heart and blurred her eyes in no small amount. That sure wasn't going to help her skulk in the dark, so she wiped them clear with a silent grumble and slipped through the door.

Extra stealth was called for as she passed Laura's room — she didn't want to wake her up, but was also curious if she was awake. A conversation would be nice, and Laura hadn't been too crazy of a meet-the-parents experience. Unlike mine. Jesus. Rebecca feels bad for me, but that wasn't a fun experience for her either.

Oddly, Laura's door was open farther than Sam had expected, enough that she could see the bed was empty. The room was too, unless Laura was specifically hiding behind the door in some sort of prescient scare-her-daughter's-date gambit. Sam was content dismissing that notion just based on (im)probability and turned the flashlight on to its lowest setting, shining it through a tiny gap between her fingers as she made her way into the kitchen.

The open floorplan core of the cabin wasn't as dark as expected, and she soon realized it was because light was spilling down the stairway from Walt's door. She heard voices, recognizing Walt and Laura, and decided she didn't want to risk intruding. Instead, she padded quietly to the sink, contemplating an apple or some other snack. Nothing particularly caught her attention though, so she settled for a quick drink with the flashlight off, letting her eyes adjust to the ambient light from upstairs and the darkness outside, wondering if she'd be able to see any stars or what-have-you.

That didn't pan out — the interior was still too bright by comparison, so she reached for the island to guarantee she wouldn't run into it and followed the edge around towards the hallway.

As she reached it, she was nearer the stairs again and better able to hear the voices above. She still didn't wish to eavesdrop, but something about Laura's tone and words made her halt.

"—know this is your house and you put a roof over my head, but you're being an ass, Walt."

That made Sam frown in confusion — she thought they'd been exemplary houseguests so far, helpful, appreciative, and sociable. Walt hadn't showed any signs of irritation with them either. What'd happened that she missed?

She heard footsteps and tensed, but realized it was just Walt moving around, maybe pacing. "I'm just surprised, is all. That you'd let your daughter—"

"Let my daughter, Walter?" Laura's voice was winding up a notch. "Do you want to rethink that? She's a grown woman."

"You're still her mother, and she's not that much of a grownup yet."

"The hell she isn't. Literally. The hell she slogged through getting here, with a bunch of friends who care enough to make the trip for her."

"I'm glad she has friends, Laura. She's a good kid." Sam started to think she should just trust Laura to handle this, head back to— "And her friends all seem like decent people, I guess."

"Good enough to be her friends? I'm glad you think so." What's Laura so mad about? "But not good enough to be her girlfriend?"

A familiar pang of throbbing revulsion started to poke through Sam's drowsy confusion.

"It's not that, she seems great. It's just not natural—"

Sam didn't hear the rest of his sentence, she was suddenly too preoccupied with feeling physically ill, like someone had waved rotten food under her nose. She hadn't had to deal with open homophobia for a long time — although this was questionably "open". Not since Lassart gave her funny looks and asked odd questions about a cute lass she'd kissed under the bridge one night, long before Rebecca arrived. She eventually just flat out asked him if there was going to be a problem, and he shut the fuck up. His pudgy ass hadn't even been topside when it happened, so clearly someone had muttered in his ear. Sadly, she never found out who to arrange a tragic electrical accident for.

That same usually quiescent swath of her personality reared up hissing in the present. It seethed, giving her well more than half a mind to walk upstairs and hand Walter Sutton a piece of his backwards bigoted ass. He'd been "great" too, but she'd—

Sam stopped herself with a shaky sigh. No, dammit. You'll wake up everyone and stress out Rebecca. How the hell am I supposed to sleep now, in a house I no longer feel welcome in? She started to dejectedly slump back towards the bedroom with a hand over her stomach, concentrating on not dropping the flashlight, but Laura's lashing voice gave her pause again.

"Oh, don't you give me Mom & Dad's backwards bullshit, Walter. You think I didn't curiously peek in the garbage can myself before you retrieved those magazines, the ones Mom found and threw out in a screaming tirade? I just wanted to know what the all the fuss was about, and there I find Miss October and November all wrapped up in each other for the Christmas Special. Thank you very much for the educational experience, I never saw Mrs. Claus in the same light ever again. Girls together are hot when it's for young Walt to enjoy, but grumpy old Walt thinks it's not okay if they actually love each other?"

She still felt queasy, but... Daaaaaaaaaamn, Mrs. C. Hope there's some cold water up there for that burn.

"Dammit, Laura. You'll wake someone up."

Too late. Sam briefly wondered if she'd been kept up by subconsciously hearing them upstairs, but then Laura went in hot again.

"And if I do, it's probably going to be Rebecca and Sam since they're right below us, and how embarrassing that'll be for you." Laura spat that with surprising venom, but lowered her voice anyway — probably more out of concern for everyone but her brother right then.

Sam missed a few words as she heard footsteps above, but then Laura must have turned back towards the door or something. "...took me a minute to get my head around, but damn it Walter, that exemplary young lady eased my daughter's broken... no, crushed heart. I'm almost glad the world fucking ended, because now I don't have to worry about Rebecca getting fired or kicked out of her lease for loving someone who just happens to be a woman. Ooooh, scary! It's the fucking twenty-first century, Walter. Try to catch up."

They lapsed into silence upstairs, probably glaring at each other if Sam's guess was right. She didn't want to be standing there if Laura headed down, so Sam took some amount of comfort in the way Laura had championed her and slunk back to the bedroom, wondering again just how the hell she was going to sleep.

**

The answer to Sam's question was "not long" and "not well". She wasn't sure how long it took to fade off, but her last estimate was in the vicinity of forty minutes after she paused the music coming through her earbuds and turned off her phone.

She woke to Rebecca whacking her with a flailed arm and sitting up with a desperate, loud gasp like she'd just resurfaced after a near drowning. By the time Sam recovered from the blow and sat up, Rebecca was already backing desperately towards the head of the bed and hyperventilating.

Sam frantically tried to get her bearings. Shitshitshit what happened, what did I do, what do I do...

She grit her teeth, forcing her brain through an emergency zero-caffeine startup as she rolled across the space surrendered by Rebecca's retreating feet. She clawed across the table for the first flashlight she touched and turned it on, aimed at the floor so the light would scatter throughout the room. "Rebecca, hey, it's me. You're safe, I'm right here, nobody else is, you're okay."

Rebecca's eyes swept the room and then met hers with a flicker of visible relief, but terror still lingered.

"I swear I will be right back with your mom." Sam left the flashlight on the bed and swept through the door to Laura's, rapping twice before pushing it open.

"Laura, it's Sam. Rebecca needs you, please." Sam forgot about her habitual use of nicknames in the frenzied moment.

Laura sat up halfway with one hand on her forehead, struggling awake. "W- what? Sam?"

"Rebecca needs you," Sam repeated, slowing but stressing her words. "Please, come quickly."

Laura's mind must've clicked into gear, because she threw the covers back and snatched a light robe from the bedpost. She wrapped it around herself, but stumbled coming around the corner of the bed. Sam took an instinctive step forward with a hand extended to catch her, but backed out of the way when Laura recovered, and gestured her towards the other bedroom.

"What happened?" Laura asked as she passed, quickly locking on to Rebecca and sitting on the bed in front of her.

"Really bad nightmare, I think." Sam followed Laura in, turned on a lantern for gentler lighting and switched off the flashlight, then knelt beside the bed. She wanted to leave Rebecca space to retreat into the rest of the bed if she needed to.

Laura held her arms up, maybe taking a queue from Sam's gestures, and Rebecca rolled forward from her fetal ball and slumped into Laura's embrace. Her breathing was still deep and ragged, but sounded like she was actually getting full lungfuls each cycle, not breathing shallow and rapidly anymore. Her head was facing away, but Sam could still tell by sound that the tears had started. Laura rocked her and crooned softly, singing something Sam couldn't make out.

Sam let out a long sigh, bleeding off tension and panic, and shivered. Laura saw, and nodded towards the stove when Sam glanced up at her. Yeah, okay. Make fire, I can handle that.

She opened the stove and didn't bother with the stirring up coals to relight things routine they did at home for conservation's sake. She just shoved several handfuls of kindling and scoop of sawdust in, jammed their USB-rechargeable candle lighter into the middle of the pile, and held down the button to let the plasma arc do its thing at a thousand-something Celsius for several seconds.

She noted as she blew the ash off of it afterwards that she was fully into "girlfriend sad, smash problem" territory and tried to rein some of that back before she turned around. Rebecca was starting to mumble answers to Laura's gentle questions, so she carefully climbed over the footboard to sit at the free corner of the bed.

Laura had apparently run through a few yes / no questions with Rebecca, and Sam felt a little better about the time she Boolean-logicked her way through that first breakdown in the workshop last autumn. Rebecca was starting a longer reply when Sam settled.

"I... couldn't breathe. Someone or something really dark and bad was on top of me." She lifted her head enough to look at Sam through her messy hair. "It wasn't you, Rosie. I'm sure." It hurt, how much that relieved Sam, and that Rebecca needed to think of saying it, but it beat the alternative.

Laura caressed Rebecca's hair, and she leaned her head down again. "I could't breathe, and I couldn't move. I tried to wake up, again and again. It didn't feel like I ever would." A shudder wracked her body as she sighed, and Sam passed the edges of the blankets to Laura to wrap around the two of them.

"You're safe now, sweetheart," Laura told her, maybe for the dozenth time.

Sam leaned back against the wall and let her eyes droop, drifting for a while. She opened them again when she felt movement, and saw Laura repositioning to lean against the headboard while Rebecca sagged against her chest. Laura glanced pointedly at one of the pillows and then towards the door, and Sam nodded.

She helped slide a pillow behind Laura's head when she returned, then spread the blankets out evenly over the two of them. Yet again, she missed their luxurious queen bed back home, she might have fit in one corner of that. For now though, she quietly piled everything from the chair on the floor. When she reached for Rebecca's borrowed robe to pull over herself, Laura clicked her tongue at her and nodded towards the door again.

Sam wasn't sure if that was encouragement to use her bed or just go get a blanket, but she opted for the latter, hauling a comforter back into their room over her shoulder and nesting up on the chair as best she could. She was drained enough that her chin soon sagged towards her chest, and the world grew fuzzy.