Night Shift [h.s]

thirty five

PSA: similar trigger warnings from the past few chapters.

☁️ ALANNAH ☁️

We had been brought up into the surgical ward as soon as they had whisked Harry away for surgery. We had to take the walk pretty slow because I was adamant the whole time that my legs were going to give out and I'd end up on the floor. Niall was practically having to bare my weight to get me through and once I slumped myself down in the grey chairs of the waiting room, I swore I wasn't moving.

My body collapsed into the plastic and it was having to take all of my weight, both physical and mental. I couldn't hold it together any longer.

All five of us, Niall and Rosie included, just sat in silence for what felt like hours on end when in reality it had probably only been about twenty minutes of watching the clock go by with my heart already lurching to know how it was going and how Harry was doing. I was dying to just peek my head into the room just to make sure that everything was going as planned. But I couldn't move. I felt as though I was bolted to the chair with a million weights layered on top of me.

I couldn't move even if I wanted to.

At some point throughout the minutes that tick past, Anne finally brought herself to ask Niall what had happened and how her son had ended up in the operating theatre when he should've been working a shift. We all should've been working a shift and nursing people back to health, we shouldn't be sitting here in a waiting room watching the minutes tick by. But we still had hours to go.

I had to make sure I shut myself off when Niall began to to retell the horrors of what had happened earlier on in the evening. I blocked out his words and refused to listen to any of them again. I couldn't bring myself to face it anymore. I had to zone out and only focus on the ticking on the clock on the wall. The ticking that felt as though it was counting down to my death like a ticking time bomb.

There was no way I could listen to the tragedies on repeat again.

I was doing my very best to block it all out and ignore it. I even sat and closed my eyes for a little while to pretend that I was far far away, on a beach or maybe in a countryside cottage with my little family. I almost smiled when I began to imagine Harmony chasing Harry around a garden full of greenery, hearty smiles on the both of them as the giggled in the wind and I was sat back breastfeeding our little baby, mumbling lightly to them how their sister and daddy were so silly. I had a smile on my face and I actually nearly let out a smile in reality too.

That was until Gemma was giving me a little nudge and snapping me out of my sun filled daydream that I was trying to convince myself with. I was trying to assure myself that everything was just fine. I was trying to get myself away from this waiting room and into a place where our little family had been entirely unharmed.