OUT OF THE RED ↝ dave grohl

seventy-two.

         "I CAN'T STOP looking at her," Kate ogled, sitting in the loveseat chair that Dave had given up fo her. She was at Reagan's hospital bedside, staring into Gracie's incubator with round eyes that had not lost their sheen of tears since she'd first entered the room.

"You and me both," Reagan said. Her hand had started to ache from keeping it stretched out into the walls of the incubator, close enough so that she could caress the blankets encasing her daughter whenever she so pleased. Everyone who had trickled in and out of the room, Dave included, had urged to catch up on her sleep, but she'd been unable to shut her eyes towards the miracle that laid right in front of her. She stared at Gracie hungrily, watching the faint rise and fall of her chest with every minute that passed. She didn't want to miss a moment. She didn't want to close her eyes only to open them several hours later and learn that something had happened, that Gracie had become unstable in the time that she was sleeping.

"You're a mom," Kate whispered softly. She reached out and touched her fingertips to Reagan's wrist, smiling a watery smile that quivered at her lips.

"And you're an aunt," Reagan replied. They spoke in hushed whispers, attempting to be courteous of Dave who had pulled up another chair to Reagan's bed and was lulling his head against her thigh. He was fast asleep, snoring gently as he dreamed beside his wife. Reagan didn't envy him. He may have felt comfortable enough to slip into unconsciousness, but she wasn't ready to turn away from Gracie. Not yet. She was still trying to process that the living, breathing little thing next to her was wholly and entirely hers.

"I wish I could hold her," Kate said.

"Dave and I said the same thing. It's not the same, not being able to hold her and feed her and talk to her. I want to feel her in my arms. I want to know that she's real," Reagan explained in a rushed jumble of words, vocalizing the thoughts that had raced inside her head for the past several hours.

"You know, I don't see much of Dave in her," Kate remarked after snatching a glimpse at Dave's wilted upper body, splayed out by Reagan's legs. "She kind of looks more like you."

Reagan scrunched back her nose. "It's too soon to tell. And I don't believe that, anyways. She'll turn out like him. Just watch."

Kate sniffed and stuck a single finger into one of the incubator's holes, gently touching Gracie's velvet soft cheek with the very tip of it. Reagan did not think that she had ever seen her sister overcome with so much emotion at once. From the moment that she had walked into the hospital room, she had sank into the same trance that Reagan and Dave had disappeared into as soon as Gracie had been born. She was just barely hours old and she already had a grip on anyone and everyone who met her.

"She's a little fighter," Kate said. "Just like her mom."

Reagan smiled. "Did you get around to calling Chris?"

"I did. She said that she'd wait to see you guys. She knows that there is a lot going on right now."

"I want to talk to her."

Out of every voice that had attempted to coax Reagan into relaxation, she most craved hearing Chris's. Perhaps hearing her friend's voice would root her back down to earth, back to the normalcy of her life. It would remind her that some things had not changed. She could still be a mother and be the same person that she was a day, a month, even a year ago.

There was a soft knock at the door before it opened, spilling in a sliver of fluorescent light from the hospital hallways. The first head that Reagan saw peek in was her mother's. She would have recognized her own shade of auburn locks from anywhere.

"Is she sleeping?" Kimberly stage-whispered. Reagan, suddenly tense, straightened up in her bed.

"I'm awake, Mom."