Disclaimer: Jericho is not mine.
The baby is crying. He can hear her. He struggles up out from under blankets that seem far too heavy - as if they are trying to hold him down and keep him from getting to his little girl. He fights his way out from underneath them and hurries to the hall where he pauses and struggles to determine in which direction he needs to go. He can still hear her, but he cannot seem to find from where the crying is coming. He chooses the obvious path. He tries the nursery first, but the nursery is empty. The crib holds only a blanket, and the rocking chair is slowly rocking itself back and forth as if it has been recently vacated. He does not know where to look next. He does not know where the baby has gone. The baby cannot have gone anywhere by herself, so what he really does not know is where it is that they have gone. April must have moved her, but he does not know where. He cannot pinpoint the source of the sound. It feels like it is coming from all directions at once leaving him feeling helpless in the center of the noise that he wants to stop. He wants to cuddle her close and reassure her that her daddy is with her. He wants to tell her that everything will be alright.
Tracy keeps crying, but the sound changes. There is a hitch to it as if she is starting to give up on trying to get his attention. He hates the thought that his little girl is starting to believe that he will not be coming for her. He starts rushing through the house throwing open doors and looking under things as if they are playing some warped version of hide and seek. He needs to find the baby. Tracy needs him, and if the baby is crying the way that she is, then April must need him as well. Something has happened. Something is wrong. He needs to find them both.
He moves more quickly, but he never seems to get any closer to from where the sound is coming. The house has disappeared from around him, but he does not notice that. The open white space in which he is standing is glaringly empty until it is not. The sound of Tracy crying is abruptly silenced as splashes of red appear all around him. He realizes that the red is blood at the same time that he sees that he has finally found them. April is holding a now silent bundle of blankets close to her chest as the red stains covering the both of them seem to grow ever larger. April does not say anything. She just looks at him with a desperate, pleading expression before she collapses in a heap on the ground. He is not close enough to catch them when they fall. He cannot reach out his arms to stop them from hitting the ground. He cannot make his legs move to get him closer. He cannot reach them. He cannot touch them. He cannot help them. He has failed.
There is no more crying. His baby is still. April still has that desperate, pleading expression frozen across her features and in her eyes which have not closed. That is all he can see as the sea of red continues to spread until it covers the both of them and hides them from his gaze. When the paralysis that had overtaken him finally releases his body and allows him movement, it is too late for him to do anything other than sink to his knees and allow the sobs to overtake him. The red has reached him, and his hands are covered in it despite the fact that he cannot seem to reach out and touch the place where his family was lost to his view. He stares at the stains and knows instinctively that there is nothing that he will ever be able to do that will make his hands come clean. He is marked. His failure is written there in Tracy's blood and April's blood for everyone to see. He did not get to them in time. He was not there when they needed him. He does not know why he could not find them. He does not know what it was that kept him from getting to them or touching them. He only knows that it happened. He only knows that they are gone.
He sits up with a start - breathing heavily and surrounded by darkness. There is no white room. There is no pool of blood. He is not even in his bedroom back in Jericho. That bedroom is gone - lost to a fire what feels like several lifetimes ago. There was never any nursery in that house. There was never a nursery for Tracy in any house. He never got that far. April never got that far. They never got that far. They never got to a lot of things. For April and Tracy, it is too late to get to a lot of things that were supposed to happen later. He will never get to rock his baby girl. April was so sure that the baby was going to be a girl. He never got to ask her why. He never tried to ask her why. They were not exactly on question asking terms. They were barely on speaking terms. April did not trust him. He cannot fault her for that. He never got the chance to prove to her that she could trust him to be a dad. He does not know if it would have made a difference. He does not know how much additional stress played a part in what happened. He does not know that anything would have been different if he would have stayed around and been involved.
He can never know those things - that does not change the guilt that attacks him when he sleeps. It does not change the nightmares. It does not mitigate the overwhelming sense of failure that haunts him in the nights and chases him through his days. He goes through the motions in New Bern. He exchanges the expected comments on the work in front of him during his days at the plant. Everything filters through a haze of loss. He thinks it is worse because there is a part of him that tells him that he should not get to claim grief for a loss when he walked away before the loss occurred. His head does not make sense even to himself. He does not know what he is thinking. He only knows how he feels. He only knows that he is exhausted but that there is no point in trying to go back to a sleep that will be anything but restful.
He only registers working and worried glances from Stanley. He sometimes finds himself eating and belatedly realizes that Stanley or Heather have pushed something into his hands. He feels empty, and he knows that the one thing that could fill up that gaping hole that has appeared inside of him is something that he cannot get back.