Leigh isn't stupid. Why doesn't she get it? "...they're going to die anyways. all we'd be doing is changing when." 

Oh. She's burnt out. (Stavi has been working so hard for the last few months, harder than most of the full-timers. Maybe this is Leigh's fault... ugh.)

"...I think you need a bit of a break," she says gently, putting a hand on the young woman's shoulder. "Stay up here for a bit? Enjoy the air. The clouds are beautiful, aren't they? I'll do q bubble tea order, bring you your favorite." 

Stavi really doesn't see how a break would matter, but she trusts Leigh and arguing about it seems kinda pointless, so.

She shrugs. 

Alright. Leigh has to get back to work, but she can set up a doordash order for bubble tea and put Stavi's in her cart for her.

She gives her a shoulder squeeze as she stands up. "It's going to be okay." 

lol. lmao.

Stavi sits on the roof, alone with her thoughts. (They aren't pleasant company. That doesn't matter.)

The wind is making it chilly. That doesn't matter either.

Her phone rings. She picks it up on autopilot. 

Her mom, through her sobs, tells her that Uncle Zalph was mauled by a dungeon monster in work. He's in critical condition. The doctors don't think he's going to make it. 

Stavi doesn't say anything. (why would she?)

It takes her mom a while to notice (she's, understandably, a bit distracted) but when she asks how soon Stavi can fly out and doesn't get any answer, she realizes that her daughter hasn't said anything since picking up the phone. 

"-Stavi, are you there?" 

"yes." 

Her daughter's voice sounds flat, detached, the way it does when she's playing a game or something on her computer.

Anger floods through her. "Stavi, your uncle is dying." 

She knows. "...he was always going to die."

The (loud, angry, illogical) extended response from her mom confirms what Stavi should have already known, which is that she doesn't get it and there's no point trying to explain it.

(It won't change anything, really, if her mom gets it or not. She's not sure why she thought it might. Stupid of her.)

She doesn't bother saying anything else. Her mother yells at her through the phone, for a while, and Stavi hears it all, and none of it matters even a little bit.

LeightUp: I think it's just burnout, Alex. She's been working as hard as anyone here, even Carl and Annie, and we've been stretching her too thin
LeightUp: I know we technically hired her to do UI but core would be fucked without her?
AlexiShin: It was still grossly unprofessional.
AlexiShin: And if you needed her that badly, you should have told me sooner.
AlexiShin: I need to figure out what to tell Annie. And our investors, on Friday, if Stavi doesn't even have a UI timeline.
LeightUp: sigh
LeightUp: I'll go see where she's at with the UI. I know she was working on it concurrently with the core alg work, I saw the commits.

...Stavi is idle on Slack. Leigh takes her headphones off and looks around.

Stavi's chair is empty. (Her laptop and bag are still there.)

Huh. It's been... (she looks at timestamps in her DMs with Alex) almost two hours since they chatted on the roof? 

Stavi wouldn't still be up there, it started raining before the boba was delivered (...she hasn't gotten her boba, either, it's still over on the table). So where is she?

Not in any of the meeting rooms, not in the break room, not over by the window where she likes sitting with coffee sometimes...

This is concerning! Leigh is concerned!

After she verifies that Stavi isn't in any of the (gender-neutral, private-stall) bathrooms on their floor, she asks around.

Nobody's seen her, but Carl (who sits facing the hallway to the elevator and stairs and doesn't miss people walking by) says (in the tone of someone slowly realizing that they have information they did not realize they had, and also they don't like that information) that he hasn't seen her since she went to the roof.

She wouldn't have gone home without her bag or laptop, right? She couldn't have gone home without her bag, it has her keys in it, she doesn't keep them in her pockets because she hates the way they jingle and press into her skin, that was one of her submitted pieces of anonymous trivia at the icebreaker.

...is she still on the roof? She could maybe hide from the rain under the slight awning that covers the door, if she really wanted to?

...it's Leigh's turn to realize that she maybe has information that she didn't realize she had and really doesn't like.

Stavi was exhibiting some uncharacteristic signs of bad mental health.

And Leigh just. left her. Alone. On the roof.

The elevators are currently on the third and fifth floors and going down.

She takes the stairs, running until her lungs burn. (It almost certainly won't make a difference, some part of her observes clinically. Either we're catastrophizing and she's fine, or it'll already be too late. She's had plenty of time to jump.)

The door to the roof bursts open and Alexi comes out into the rain, panting.

Stavi hears it, over the sounds of the rain and the cars below and the chattering of her teeth. 

(She doesn't turn to look. Why would she.)

Oh thank frog she's okay - 

Well, she's sitting the rain almost exactly where Leigh left her, staring into the void and violently shivering. 

(Her phone is on the ground next, face up in a large pool of water, with a massive crack on the screen that wasn't there two hours ago. The screen is dark.)