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Frannie wasn't sure how long she stood in her bedroom with the door handle in her hand. All she knew was that her jaw ached from holding it open for so long.

She also knew that she was standing in her bedroom. Her old one, in Ogunquit, with the same posters and trophies it had held since she left for college years ago. A lifetime ago. Before the end of the world.

Eventually, when her brain processed what she was seeing, she started thinking. As much as she wanted to rush out into the house, and into...into the garden...she was afraid of what she'd see there, too. Afraid she'd see her father, alive but sick. Afraid she'd see his grave.

Afraid she'd see that it had been disturbed somehow.

Afraid that if the door she still held closed, she'd be stuck here in her old house alone again. Alone in Maine with everyone she knew on the other side of the country. Alone in the world.

Once the first tremors of fear passed her, she realized something else. She was standing in a world that had been toxic to 99% of it's residents....and she held the door open, spilling that air into the hotel.

Before that thought even finished forming, Frannie stepped back into Nexus and slammed the door as hard as she could and pressed her back against it.

"Anyone got a hammer? Some nails maybe?" she called out to anyone that could hear her voice.

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"I was looking for a linen closet," Frannie replied, knees buckling in relief when she saw Larry approaching. "I walked into my bedroom, Larry. The one in Ogunquit. The..the windows were open. I could feel the breeze on my face."

He'd know as well as she did what that meant.

Larry's hands reached instinctively out to catch Frannie under the arms, afraid that in her relief she might slide all the way down to the floor. There hadn't been many people in his life who had ever framed him in such terms, a tangible enough savior that rescue was implied by his mere presence, and it took him a moment of swallowing back against the strange and potent reaction it evoked before he was able to process what had been said.

The room. Of course.

Larry frowned, his eyes briefly flicking to the smooth wood of the closed door as if he might see what lay beyond.

"I don't know if it's the real thing or not," he said, thinking of his own room, an almost exact replica of the living room he'd shared with Lucy and Leo back home. "Better safe than sorry, though, yeah?"

"It smelled real," she insisted. "I've been missing Maine a lot lately, a really lot. And what I smelled coming in through that window smelled like Maine. Just salty enough to be a little sea air in there, the flowers."

Frannie shuddered. "And probably guaranteed to wipe the hotel out in two weeks if people start wandering through there and bring the superflu back through that door. I don't know about you, but I'd really rather not go through that again."

"You're right," Larry agreed with a hasty nod, hands slipping away now that he felt confident Frannie could stand on her own. He didn't know how to tell her that his own room was the same, that everything about it was destined to pierce him right through, from the lovingly-worn sofa he used as a bed to Lucy's faintly lingering scent, but that it couldn't be real, was missing tangible elements even beyond the people who should have been there with him. The doors didn't open and the stairs led nowhere, like the place was a mask, a facade designed to either comfort or grieve him depending on the day.

"We'll seal it up," he continued, despite knowing the futility of the act. "I've got some tools down in the garden shed, you okay waiting here while I go grab 'em?"

"Someone should," Fran agreed, "just in case. I'd offer to let you play guard duty guy while I went for the tools, but I'm not exactly speedy these days."

The whiplash was long gone, as were the bruises from the explosion, but she still wasn't in any hurry to push herself. Not without a doctor here.

"It'll be alright," Larry said, and gave Frannie's shoulder a brief squeeze, hoping he seemed more confident than he felt, if only for her sake. Even now he lacked the sort of quiet assurance that had made Stu a natural leader. Fran would probably see right through him.

Before he left, he hastily grabbed a nearby armchair and hauled it over, providing Frannie a place to sit while she waited. Maybe having the door more fully blocked off would make her feel better.

"Sit tight, I'll be back in a couple minutes," he promised, and then sprinted down the hall.