OUT OF THE RED ↝ dave grohl

one-hundred-thirty-three.

SEPTEMBER 17th, 2001, LOS ANGELES, CA

IT WAS A strange thing to feel united with the whole country in a shared sense of sadness. There had been disasters before, many that Reagan could remember prominently, but nothing had quite stunned the population of America into such aching loss as what had happened less than a week prior.

She couldn't get the images from the television out of her head. Planes crashing into the World Trade Center, eviscerating the buildings and people still trapped inside of them within the span of two hours.

The mere fact that it had played out before her eyes had been a lot to process, but the tragedy was even harder to make sense of when Reagan was already struggling. She'd felt nothing but shock at first as she'd stood amongst her coworkers in the Geffen office, watching as terror unfolded in New York City.

She felt selfish, sitting around viewing the terrorist attacks through a lens that suggested she was taking a personal slight. If anything, she just couldn't understand that it'd happened. Like many other people, she was shouldering her own tragedies and now a new one, a mutually shared one across every state line, had occurred.

Reagan sat one of the barstools she'd recently added to the kitchen countertops, rocking gently with her hands clasped to her shoulders. The house was dead quiet. In the days after 9/11, she'd stayed glued to the television, devouring every available piece of news coverage like the rest of the world, but it had gotten to be too much. She'd eventually shut off the t.v. and kept it that way, unable to stomach the constant replays of destruction and death.

As she drew the tip of her pointer finger along the counter, creating invisible swirling circles, she thought of her family. She missed them and yearned for their company as badly as ever in the midst of all the tragedy, but of course Kimberly had shrieked at her not to get on a plane. Not any time soon, at least.

It probably wouldn't have helped, being in her childhood home anyway. She would have had the company she was craving, but it would have been off kilter, overpowered the permeant sadness that had consumed the Abner household. The whole summer had been hell in itself, jetting back and forth between Los Angeles and Olympia and looking into Richard's eyes, reading past the attempt of a smile that he offered her. It was hard, even though necessary, to be around her dad when time was fading fast. It was even harder to watch him change in small progressions, forgetting simple things like the names of places from their best memories or the melodies of songs they'd sung together on card rides.

Dropping her cheek into her hand, Reagan flipped over her cellphone. No new messages. The last time she'd received a call, it had been from Jesse.

He'd been in New York on the eleventh — a routine visit back to home. She'd frantically gotten a hold of him the day of the attacks and of course, he'd been distraught, but he was safely out of the city now. Scarred beyond belief, but safe at least. She wondered how fucked up he'd be the next time she saw him, though it killed her to imagine it. Even on the phone she'd been able to tell that Jesse's effervescent happiness had been extinguished by what he'd seen happen to his beloved New York. She wished she could have said something — anything to comfort him, but it was simply too big of a shock for her to coax him out of on her own.

It was even harder trying to balance her worry for Jesse with the mingling thoughts of Dave that had been stewing in the back of her mind since August. The attack on New York had only amplified them, serving as half the reason as to why Reagan's heart hadn't stopped racing.

She missed him. She missed him horribly. Between the personal tragedy of nearly losing Taylor and now the one that had engulfed the world, there was only one person whose company Reagan truly felt she needed most and it was Dave's.