"Stavi?" She rushes over, stomach churning violently. (what - why is she just -) "Stavi, what's wrong, what happened,"

Stavi doesn't say anything, doesn't even acknowledge that Leigh is there. 

What would she even say? "We're both going to die and everyone who we've ever known or loved will die too and we're all going to be forgotten, someday, and then the stars will go out and none of this will have ever mattered even a little bit?" Why would she bother saying that. It's going to happen either way.

Stavi is shivering uncontrollably and not responding to anything she says.

Leigh calls 911 and explains the problem, right in front of Stavi because maybe that will help her snap out of it and also she doesn't super want to let Stavi out of her line of sight, right now!

     The operator's voice is crisp and calm. "Is she breathing?" 

"Yes."

     "Is she conscious? Does she respond to her environment?"

"I am pretty sure she's conscious but she's not responding at all," not even to this conversation about her right in front of her face.

     "Does she have a history of recreational drug use?"

"No." Stavi doesn't even drink.

     "Is her skin turning pale or blue?"

"...her lips are a bit blue. And she's pale all over."

...While waiting for the 911 dispatch, Leigh is instructed to try and get Stavi inside and to a warm area, and then. Remove her wet clothes and wrap her in dry fabric as much as possible, focusing on her head, chest, and neck.

(This is a very weird thing for a tech VP to be doing three weeks before they exit stealth. Stavi could fucking die if she doesn't so who cares if it's weird!

Leigh calls Alexi and puts her on speakerphone, and tells her to bring the box of spare swag clothes up. And Stavi still isn't responding, so she grabs her best coder's hand and tries to pull her upright.

...Stavi isn't going to fight and isn't intentionally going limp, but it's going to take a lot more than just pulling on her hand to get her upright, because she's not contributing much, either.

Leigh is about half a foot taller than Stavi and hits the gym after work every day for an hour to unwind. She can more or less carry her inside.

And then she can... start undressing. Her subordinate who is six years younger than her and, like, not especially hot but certainly not ugly or anything. (Clips of HR videos from her first job play in her head. She ignores them.)

Stavi would have heard the 911 operator explain this over speakerphone already, but Leigh explains it out loud anyways, as she's doing it, because it makes her feel a bit less insane. (That's a cute bra? brain can you SHUT UP)

(It doesn't matter that she's cold and maybe freezing to death. She noticed she was shivering, earlier, she's not stupid, but it would have been more effort to make herself stop, even if it was pretty unpleasant.)

...Leigh doesn't get it, and Stavi isn't interested in fixing that for her. (She's smart; maybe she'll figure that out on her own. But it doesn't matter if she does or not. It won't change anything, not really.)

(Man this is easily the least sexy clothes removal of her entire life shut up shut up shut uuuuup)

Stavi really does not look good. Leigh hugs her for warmth.

Alex is kind of annoyed at being given an errand like this without much explanation, but Leigh told her to hurry and she did manage the swag in the first place, she's the right person to ask if it really is an emergency.

The elevator door opens and she sees their engineering VP hugging the weird intern new hire who has just dropped a massive headache on Alex's plate. And the girl's half naked. 

She coughs, very pointedly, as she approaches. (She doesn't say what the actual fuck is happening here, Leigh, but only because her brain is struggling with putting it into reasonably professional terms on the spot.)

Leigh doesn't even turn, but she does correctly interpret the cough. "The EMT said I should wrap her in dry fabrics to stop her from losing more heat. Alex, she was just - sitting out there in the rain, slowly freezing to death -" her voice catches. "Hand me some of the XLs."

(What the fuck?) Alex can do that, even if she doesn't know what the fuck. She hands over the jackets. (She looks away while she does, because she doesn't want to see Stavi topless, it's staggeringly unprofessional.)

And Leigh will unhug Stavi long enough to wrap her in them.

The EMTs arrive and carefully move Stavi to a stretcher with a fancy warming blanket.

They try a few different things to get her attention and confirm that she's awake and has automatic responses (the shivering was a clue there but they have to check) but, despite a lack of dilated eyes or any other indication that this might be drug-related, the patient seems utterly uninterested in distinguishing herself from a corpse.

"Could be an esper awakening," one of EMTs says thoughtfully, after they load her into the ambulance. (The driver and other EMT groan in unison.)

...Leigh rides along, holding one of Stavi's hands. It's so cold. She doesn't like that. (Her brain feels... numb. She has her laptop with her. Maybe she'll do some work when they get to the hospital. She certainly wasn't going to get any work done if she stayed at the office.)

"I'm sorry," she whispers. "I shouldn't have left you out there."

...it's stupid of Leigh, thinking it matters. But even smart people can be stupid; Stavi is one of the smartest people she knows, and she was alive for twenty years and spent all of them thinking her actions could matter. (Maybe there's just a cut-off, and people smarter than Stavi all figure it out, and so she never meets them. That would make sense.)

"Well," the doctor says, looking at the scan results, "she's either awakening as an esper or had an unusual psychotic break, and if she was showing uncharacteristic psychological symptoms - troubling nihilism, I think you mentioned? - the esper awakening does seem decently likely. Chart says she just turned twenty?"

Leigh nods numbly. (She'd helped Stavi throw the birthday party, just a few weeks ago, because almost everyone she knows in the city she knows through Inferan. It was wild, having a coworker party for someone who couldn't legally drink, but it had been a surprising amount of fun, and Stavi had loved the fancy cake Leigh had sprung for...)

Huh. That doesn't sound right, to Stavi? She didn't think esper awakenings could make you less confused or deluded.

...she's not going to argue with them. it. doesn't. matter. 

Leigh keeps working at the hospital late into the evening, but the next day, she has too many meetings for that to be feasible.

She tries not to think about Stavi's frigid hand in hers, or the way her teeth had been chattering, or the way she'd said "they're going to die anyways" with that utterly flat voice.

(She has a lot of things to distract herself with. She has to get Stavi's changes to the core alg merged and get someone on triple checking that, while she figures out out how to cobble together a UI between herself, Carl, and whoever else they can spare. Ideally before Alex meets with the shareholders on Friday...)

Stavi's hospital stay goes on, one miserable day at a time. She can feel parts of her body becoming more sore and painful as she stays still in the position she's in.

Her sensory intake is filled with a variety of unpleasantries; the combination is often overwhelming. (She's been told, repeatedly, that if she wants anything, all she has to do is ask.)

None of that matters, though, not in the face of the inevitability of entropy. The arrow of time moves in one direction. Stavi's not stupid; she knows how this ends. And knowing how it ends, what else could possibly matter?

It's miserable, obviously; far more horrible than the pain and the isolation and the bad smells and sounds, so much so that those things would be a welcome distraction if they actually functioned as one, or if her suffering mattered at all.

But they don't; she can't look away from the simple truth that she's spent her entire life not noticing. The fact that it's like pressing her face against a hot stove doesn't make it any less true.

(If that which can be destroyed by the truth includes Stavi - well, that's kind of pathetic, isn't it, but doesn't matter, either, so she doesn't need to dwell on it either way.)