Lost Too Much 【REDONE】 ║ Daryl/OC or Shane/OC

Chapter 38: Maybe I've lost hope and I shouldn't have.

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(DAY 116) Today's been especially rough. Since discovering that I'm pregnant, I've been stressed as hell, but today seems like the worst day yet. It's been over 3 weeks since Phillip and I got engaged, and we were supposed to be happy about that for awhile after it happened, but we were immediately hit with this news and it's destroyed the happiness. I should be grateful. I should be happy to be pregnant, that I'm capable of having a baby and glad that I'm in a safe place to have the child, but it just doesn't really feel like happy news. I wish I could take my mind off of it, but pregnant ladies can't drink.

This isn't why today's been so rough, though. I realized today that it's about the middle of June, and Michelle's birthday would be coming up soon. Aside from that, I left my fucking house on Day 1 at the end of February, and it's June now, and I haven't seen a single person that I knew before the apocalypse. Not even random people from my life, no old college classmates or anything. I haven't seen Clark, and I've begun feeling like shit because I talked about Merle and Daryl in 90 percent of this journal and I have not once said that I wanted to see Clark again. I talked about Chad, for god's sake, and not one of my friends. I'll admit, though, I wasn't nearly as close with Clark as any of the other people I've talked about, so it isn't like there's enough emotion to make me miss him immensely. But still, though those reasons contribute to why I feel like shit more today than ever, there's a more genuine, real reason for it.

I had this dream once, back last year, that was basically me in a pitch black area, I don't think it was a room, but more like a field or spot of open land, and it's just completely black. It's in first person point of view, looking from my own eyes. I can't see where I am, but I can see my hands reach out and pet the hair of a young boy, a child so young he couldn't have been any older than a few months. It shouldn't have been outside on the grass with nothing under it, but it was. It must've been my child in the dream, but there was no indication of who the father was or if it was actually mine, but I just had a feeling in the dream that he was my baby.

Anyways, I could see my hand reach out to pet the baby's head, flattening what little hair was on his head. I just sat and did it for a couple seconds without anything else going on until a little time passes and I sense that I'm crying and retract my hand from the baby to wipe my tears. When I go to pet the baby's hair again, there's blood on my hand, assumedly from me wiping my face, indicating that I was either crying blood or bleeding on my face. I continue to unintentionally smear blood on this baby's head, but now I start speaking.
"I love you, Vince. Your daddy did it for you. He's still here." There's no knowledge, again, of who the father is, or what happened to him, what he 'did' for the baby. But I had then learned that my child's name was Vince.

After that, the baby breaks into a blood-curdling shriek and suddenly, dogs start running in from all sides. I jump up from the ground and grab Vince, storming through the stampede of dogs in the direction of what seems to be Merle and Daryl's house. As I gain sight of their front door, the field around me starts to light up to a viewable brightness and transform into the street we all lived on. In the dream, I turn around to look at the stampede of dogs and see my own house in the background, Chad and Denise standing on the porch, watching me and my child get chased down the road. After I reach the Dixon's door, they both look out the living room window at me, but neither comes to open the door. I try to get in, but it's locked. They just watched. I woke up from the dream just as one of the dogs reaches the porch.

I remember that I told Merle and Daryl about that dream the morning after it happened. Merle figured out that the baby's name had come from a conversation the day before. There was a character on a show whose name was Vince and Merle had commented that it sounded like a prissy ass name for a spoiled rich kid. The dream originated there. But last night into this morning, the dream happened again, and that's why today has been so rough.
This morning, the exact dream replayed, not a single detail changed. When I woke up, it occurred to me that maybe this time, it was a sign or something. Maybe my brain was trying to give me the idea that having a child was dangerous. The dogs could've symbolized me running from danger while having to watch out for Vince the baby. But then again, maybe the dream just repeated because I've had babies on my mind so much recently.