When she woke, she thought of him. When she laid her head on her satin pillowcase, the sheen material disappearing under her curls, she thought of him then, too. On her daily walk to her apartment, while she waited for fifteen minutes in line at the food court, and in her classes while her professors' voices droned in spirals through her ears - all moments were glazed over with daydreams. The very thought of Sam Winchester had painted her mind with a glossy, boylike sheen.

She thought of other things, too. In darker moments, when light didn't shine through the library windows, or when she sat alone in her dorm after dinner, she thought of how she was dying. In these times, Sam was no longer an acolyte of the sun. Instead, he was the harbinger of the space between the moon and the stars, trading warm rays for a black nothingness that devoured.

It was devouring Bellona with every day that she lived, but she could not avoid it. Instead, she was forced to confront it in fragments, at random times being faced with shattered pieces of a future that could never be hers.

When an unexpected migraine pummeled her temples, she saw the inky black Sam then, seemingly bright but leaden with regrets. She would close her eyes and there he would stand: two feet away and holding her face between his hands, whispering the hopes of her dream as she grew nauseous. They were small symptoms at first. And still, they would force her to see him. He was the Sam of the future - her Sam - a Sam she could never truly call her own, so he was plagued to live as an abyss in her mind whenever cancerous symptoms arose.

"No, Mom." Bellona's voice was like a string pulled too tight, wrapped too many times around a guitar's fret. It was low. It bubbled as she spoke, trembling beneath the excess pressure and praying she wouldn't break.

Agnes persisted. "Are you sure? No problems with speech or anything?"

Bellona only shook her head. With every syllable she forced out of her aching throat, with every pluck of the stretched-out wires in her mouth, she grew closer to cracking. Water swelled more in her eyes, so much so that she feared anything more than a slight shake of her head would beckon the salt-infested waters to dance on her cheeks.

The younger girl visited her mother every morning before her classes, but the more she visited, the tighter her internal threads were pulled. Agnes found a way to bring Bellona's condition up in every visit, despite her daughter's insistence that she did not want to talk about it. She hardly even wanted to think about it.

"Okay. If your symptoms get worse, please tell me. We have to talk about your next steps," Agnes said. Her voice was so heavy that Bellona was surprised it didn't fall to the floor in front of her. She supposed, though, that it had learned to fly. It was always laden with burden, ever since the diagnosis - it would have to evolve if it did not want to fall.

Bellona nodded. "I've been thinking about radiation therapy. The doctors have called me about it a few times."

She chose to leave out the fact that the doctors had been calling her about Agnes, too. So had lawyers. They wanted to know if Bellona held a copy of her mother's will, or if she wanted to request one. If she planned on using this funeral home or that one, if Agnes wanted to prolong her treatment. She'd grown to despise the career she used to chase. She did not want to open her eyes one day and find that her job was to wait for another person to pass. She never wanted to pluck coins from their mourners before their body had even passed into the soil.

"Oh, no, sweetheart." Agnes' features crumpled as she tried to sit up, pale skin morphing into a piece of paper about to be discarded. "Not your next steps for treatment. Your next steps for your next life."

Bellona couldn't help it. She rolled her eyes.

"I'm serious," Agnes said.

Her voice was stern now, but it did not guilt Bellona into remorse, for once. Her mother had been consumed with the curse she believed had been bestowed upon her family line. Despite protests that always leapt from between Bellona's lips, the stories continued.

The stories continued, and her mother's sanity dwindled.

She didn't know how her mind had fabricated this vast lore of Hestia's curse. Her best guess was loneliness - for the past handful of years, Agnes only ever left her house to go grocery shopping - and the overflow of books that phased in and out of the shelves on her walls.

Bellona glanced at the grandfather clock that was nested in between these very shelves. It had been there since the day she was born. Sometimes, when she was younger, she would pretend it was a clock from a fairytale, vines growing over the wooden planks and fairies living among the gears inside. Now, the clock was broken, but Bellona would still pretend.

"It's almost nine," she lied. Imagined. The clock read four in the afternoon, but she would devise a fantasy if it meant she could escape her mother's stories.

"Please. Let me have a few minutes," Agnes insisted.

Bellona's first instinct was to refuse. She would leave her mother's house and return to Stanford, walking into her daily ritual of hiding from the dark Sam and welcoming the light.

She couldn't. She came here every morning to be with her mother, because neither of them could be sure how many days they had left to be human. After that, they would have to become a part of nature - living in the soil, doomed to be loved in memory but never to give love again. If she didn't give love now, while she was still discernible from the ground, she would regret it until her final day.

Bellona huffed. "Fine." She would stay, but she would not let her mother think she enjoyed it.

"Thank you," Agnes said, and Bellona knew she meant it.

There was a brief pause - an uncertainty lingering in the older woman's posture. Worry lingered in her shoulders, leaking its parasitic nature into her eyes, and then her face, tainting her already gaunt facial structure with paleness.

"Mom," Bellona said, jumping forward to crouch by her mother's chair. "What is it? What's wrong?"

Agnes took a deep, shaky breath. "I need you to listen to me about your sickness. Your curse. And I need you to remember what I say, because your life depends on it."

Bellona's first instinct was once more to turn and leave, but when she didn't move, Agnes continued her speech, saying, "I've told you about the pendant before? The one that you will need to use to save your life?"

In that moment, if Bellona hadn't seen her own chest moving up and down with every breath she took, she would have sworn that her heart stopped. Weeks ago, in the hospital, Agnes told her that the pendant would have to be used to take one of their lives, otherwise they both would perish at the hands of the curse. If her mother was telling Bellona to use it on herself, what plans did Agnes have for her own fate?

Bell nodded, lips cracking open to ask a question she'd never before imagined - are you choosing to die for me? - but Agnes interrupted her.

"I've given it to a friend to keep safe," she enunciated, careful to ensure every word was clear. "I won't tell you who; it's too soon to risk the security of the location. But when it comes time for me to go, you'll need to find my friend."

So she was choosing her daughter over herself. Bellona's heart jumped towards her throat, clawing towards the opening at the end of the tunnel. Though she knew it was a notion buried in delusion, tears still wavered at the edges of her eyes. Agnes thought she could use the pendant to save her life but she was handing it over to her daughter. She was handing her life over to her daughter.

The rhythm of Agnes' voice grew slower when she spoke next. "If you find my friend, he'll give the pendant to you. I've written down an incantation and given that to him as well. The pendant will recognize you when you hold it, and you'll have to speak the incantation while maintaining contact with it. This will initiate the process."

At this point, tears had begun to slip from the pockets in the corners of Bellona's eyes. She cringed, because at the very moment her mother's instructions had paused, a whimper grazed across her vocal chords.

"Oh, Bell," Agnes cooed, arms reaching out. Bellona fell into them, and the movement was like a wrecking ball to a dam. Tears began to flood, dripping down her skin until the pores that rested there were drowning.

"We can talk about the rest later, sweet girl," her mother whispered. "Why don't you tell me about Sam? Would that make you feel better?"

Bellona nodded. "Yes."

No. No, talking about Sam would not make it better. It would make her dreadful of her coming days, of her past. She already hated the thought of the future, because Sam would be here, and Summer would, and even Mrs. Darrow and Derrick. But the world was going to move on without the Wessons. What help was it to dwell in the heartache of loving it? Of loving it when it would let them go so soon? So easily?

Instead, Bellona yearned to love the woman who walked the same path that she did. In this, in her, she would share the knowledge of what it meant to be left behind. If a person couldn't share an experience with another, then she figured there was no reason to experience it at all.

Agnes Wesson lived her life on a cigarette. Her whole life, she'd danced into one hapless relationship, and then another. And the cigarette would burn. She'd hammer her insistent protests against the status quo of society until it cracked and sparked. And the cigarette would burn. She'd moved from one town to another, never slowing down enough to let the embers on the end of her orange stick simmer, whisking by so fast and creating enough oxygen in her stead that it only burned.

Now, there was nothing left to burn. Her orange, adhesive-wrapped stick had nothing left to give, and the years of smoking had left her mind in a blur.

The flame used to light the cigarette would not grant Agnes with rebirth, as she'd promised Bellona. The flame had dwindled, and soon it would be tossed aside by the smoker whose lips had sucked up every last bit of tobacco. It would lie in the dirt, and the world would move on, and only the bodies that had breathed in its secondhand fumes would remember.