A/N- I was trying to update a World of Our Own but couldn't get a Jonnie video I saw on youtube out of my head.
Grace sat on her bed with her knees drawn to her chest as she tried not to listen to the crying in the other room. She'd never seen her mother cry before, not properly, and seeing the tears on the usually emotionless face had shocked her. She'd been woken by the crying about half an hour ago, but when she'd creeped into the bedroom to see if her mother was ill, Grace had found her still asleep but thrashing about in the bedsheets. In a panic, Grace had tried to wake her but it had done no good, and the girl had soon fled to the safety of her bedroom. Toying with her mother's phone beside her, Grace finally found the courage to dial a number.
Jacob groaned when his phone rang, a squinted look at the clock telling him it was 2am. When he grabbed his phone, the nurse woke properly in an instant as caller ID shone brightly in the darkened room. "Connie?"
"You need to come over." Grace spoke quickly, hoping the panic in her voice wasn't as obvious to Jacob as it was to her.
"Grace?" Jacob frowned.
"You want to be with my mother, so prove it. Come over and make her better." Grace forced the words out.
"Is she sick?" Jacob questioned as he fought with his bed sheets before finally getting them off, freeing him to climb from the bed and fumble with a pair of trousers as he tried to dress.
"I don't know, I'm not a doctor!" Grace snapped. "You need to come NOW."
Torn between telling her to stop being so rude to him and just agreeing to go, the latter finally won out. "I'll be there in ten minutes. Can you make sure the front door is unlocked?"
When he heard the silence on the other end of the line, Jacob pulled the phone away from his ear and tutted with frustration when he saw Grace had hung up.
…
"You SAID you'd be here in ten minutes, but that was twelve minutes ago."
At the front door twelve minutes later, Jacob was met by a girl with tightly folded arms and a frown on her face, at odds with the pink princess pyjamas she currently wore.
Determined not to apologise, Jacob merely replied. "Traffic. Where is your mother? When you say she's sick, what do you mean?"
"She's in the bedroom, I'm sure you know where that is." Grace replied curtly.
Jacob clenched his jaw for a moment before heading towards the bedroom. "Is she vomiting? In pain?" He questioned further.
"I think she's having some sort of seizure, maybe."
When Jacob glanced back at Grace then, she just looked like a small, scared little girl and it softened him a little. "You wait here, you've done really well calling me." When he was sure Grace had sat on the lounge, Jacob took the stairs two at a time and entered the bedroom, his footfalls slowing when he saw Connie on the bed. She was tangled in her bedsheets, hair damp with sweat and tears, probably both, a frown darkening her features, but like every time he saw her after an absence, she looked almost too beautiful.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, for it was instantly obvious to him that she was having a nightmare rather than a seizure, Jacob reached out and began stroking hair from her damp forehead. "Hey, it's ok now. You're okay."
Somewhere in the deep, dark nightmare, Jacob's voice managed to get through, and slowly the woman in the bed began to calm, and when Grace could no longer hear cries she entered the room hesitantly. "Is she okay, Jacob?"
"She was just having a nightmare, nothing serious." Jacob replied, his eyes not moving from Connie's face.
Grace watched the way he stroked her mother's hair gently and saw the way her mother's body began to relax, her grip on the bedsheets loosening and her legs slowing until finally they stopped moving altogether. "Why?"
"Why what?" Jacob questioned, turning to look at the girl who looked a lot younger than the one who had opened the front door minutes earlier.
"Why is she having a nightmare?"
"I don't know." Jacob offered truthfully. "She has had a tough few weeks at work, and maybe she's not been dealing with it very well."
"…It's my fault, isn't it? For telling her she couldn't see you. I made her have a nightmare."
Jacob turned fully then, facing the girl who still hesitated in the doorway. "No. It could be one of hundreds of things she's dreaming about, firecracker, but I'm 100% sure that it's nothing to do with you."
"But I didn't help, did I? Maybe if you'd been around, she might not be holding things in." Grace approached then, sitting gently on the edge of her mother's bed next to Jacob.
"There's no point worrying about what we've done, nothing can change what's happened. What we need to think about is what we can do to stop it happening again. So I say you and me team up one more time and tackle this instead of the filing. What do you say?"
"…Okay." Grace gave a small smile.