Prompt #18: If you're lost, you can look and you will find me, Time after time. If you fall I will catch you, I'll be waiting, Time after time. – 'Time After Time', Cindy Lauper
A/N: Pre-series.

There's blood on her hands, and she's crying. He stares at her, momentarily frozen, but hears her murmur his name, and immediately snaps into action.

"Laura?"

She's pale, so pale, standing there in her nightgown, blood too red on the white material. She stumbles into his arms. "Jack – the baby – I –"

A frantic 911 call, then a call to Emily to come over and watch Sydney, and all the while Laura clings to Jack, her tears wetting his shirt.

"It's okay, sweetheart," he says, holding her hand in the ambulance.

"She's okay," he tells himself as he scrubs the blood from his hands in the hospital bathroom.

"Everything's okay," he tells Sydney over the phone. "Mommy and Daddy will be back soon. Be good for Aunt Emily, okay?"

There's an IV in her arm and she's still far too pale. She looks so fragile in the hospital bed. She looks helplessly at Jack and says, "I'm sorry."

"It's okay," he says again. "You're okay. That's all that matters."

She shakes her head. "The baby—"

"It's not your fault."

And she's crying again; he doesn't know what to do except hold her. So he carefully climbs onto the bed next to her and gently takes her into his arms.

"I love you," he says.

She sobs harder.

It's weeks before she lets him touch her again, and the more she pulls away, the more he worries that he's going to lose her.

Two months. She would have been five months along by now, he thinks.

Three months. She reaches for him when the lights are out. Moulds herself against him and he's surprised at how much weight she's lost.

"I'm sorry," she says.

He says nothing, but kisses her gently, and waits.

"I wanted that baby."

Me too, he thinks.

"I love you so much, Jack." She's crying again.

It's years later, after she's dead and he's going through her things, that he finds the Cyrillic characters spelling out his child's death, and he finally understands what she meant.