[DISCONTINUED] FIND YOU ( T. WALKING DEAD )

- III.

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FIND YOU
CHAPTER THREE;
( familiar. )

❛ jack seems unable
to escape her past. ❜

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SHE LONGED FOR silence, yet the monotone, steady beep sounding throughout the bleak room was the only thing tethering her to what was real. Reality had never been so undesirable, with her father hooked to too many machines to count, and her mother weeping across his motionless bed, but Jack persevered the best she could manage.

It only involved breathing. Surviving, of course, only involved the cyclical act of inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide, and that was all that mattered at this point. Just surviving. Everything that existed outside of the hospital room was irrelevant and not at all significant.

She only cared for the heart monitor and its repeated affirmation that her worst fears hadn't yet greeted reality. Yet, she desperately wished it would just stop. Maybe it was her weeping mother, her snoring brother, or the simple sound of her own breathing - but the beep was the last thing she needed.

She didn't want her father's heart to cease beating; she just wanted everything to stop.

"God, I...," her mother began, voice hoarse from sobbing uncontrollably for hours. As soon as Lori had seen her husband lying there, the tears began streaming down her face without relent. And when the doctors took him away, she sobbed in the waiting room, aimlessly comforting a fretful Carl and trying to speak to a stoic Jack. Seeing her husband hooked to all of the machines, but alive- she was better now, but still cried quietly. Waking Carl was the last thing she wanted to do. "The last thing I said to him this morning, I..."

Lori's shaky hand caressed the top of Rick's motionless one, index finger brushing across the area where his wedding ring should have been. How meaningless the piece of jewelry seemed to lie atop the bedside table of his hospital bed. Lori's eyes flickered to the glint of stainless steel, dimly illuminated beneath the cool luminescence of more fluorescent lights than she could bother to count; her eyes brimmed with tears when she turned back, hands holding one of Rick's own to her trembling mouth.

"It's fine."

The words left Jack's mouth instinctively. It was her response to everything her mother had said that day: "It's fine." Perhaps it was more for herself rather than her mother, she didn't know. The words left her mouth without much forethought.

Her dark eyes didn't even leave the spot on the side of his bed she'd been vacantly staring at for hours. Her lips hardly moved. She expressed no emotion whatsoever, and Lori was torn between being happy that her daughter had finally spoken to her or being scared of how resigned and dangerously calm she was. The more she tried to decide, the more Rick and his condition crept into her thoughts and became more prominent by the millisecond.