Chapter Text
Sophia had been gone for just a few hours and the children’s hospital seemed to have a protocol in place to deal with grieving parents as efficiently as possible. A doctor appeared out of nowhere with a pill that eased Claire down from her sobbing grief into the silent, medicated, sleep of the truly broken. By then, Rust was too numb to even think of flashing his badge to demand they allow him to stay longer with Sophia. He blindly followed the Nurse when she ushered him out of the room, insisting that he step outside, as if to save him from seeing them take his daughter away.
She pushed him down the hall into the pale, fluorescent visitor’s lounge, empty at this hour of the night, and asked if there was anyone he’d like to call. She gestured at a phone on the table, and began making him a cup of coffee he never asked for but had no will left to refuse.
“No. No family round here. We moved to Texas when Claire was pregnant. Claire’s parents live back East. She doesn’t talk to them often. Her mother never got over how Claire actually married me. I just have my Pop, he lives in Alaska and he doesn’t have a phone. We wrote him a letter when we got married and sent him the birth announcement when Sophia was born, but he don’t write back much, my Pop. Just isn’t his style. We were talking about going up there one summer, me and Claire and Sophia as a family so he could see his grandbaby for the first time. Sophia loves looking at the stars, and the night sky up there, there’s just nothing like it, but we were waiting until she’d be old enough...”
He stopped and cleared his throat because it suddenly became hard to breathe. “She… used to love the stars.” he finally managed to choke out, because if he said anymore he was afraid he would fall apart. He couldn’t look up, but she tapped his arm gently to let him know she was still listening, and handed him a cup of bitter coffee.
He had stayed in Sophia’s hospital room as days blurred into nights. They were not sleeping, not eating, except for coffee and those pitiful tiny packages of graham crackers the Nurses kept bringing them. Graham crackers were Sophia’s favorite snack. She used to dip them in her milk until they got too soft to hold, and Rust would laugh as Claire tried to stop a giggly Sophia from smearing them all over her high chair.
He and Claire sat vigil at their daughter’s bedside, taking turns dozing for an hour at a time, on a rough cotton hospital blanket and chair. Reading to his baby girl, hoping she would wake up from her coma and everything would go back to the way it was before. Claire’s voice breaking as she sang Sophia’s favorite songs. Then the Doctors came in with a grim, “There’s nothing we can do anymore”. He’d held Claire as she sobbed, while he wiped away the bitter tears that stung at his eyes. There was never any time to stop, they just kept moving forward until they couldn’t anymore.
Rust paused, standing still for a moment. It may have been the first time he did so in days. Everything began to hit him at once. The numb feeling that protected him so far began to wear off, and the emotions he felt were the kind that he would be trying to avoid for the rest of his life. He wanted to thank the Nurse for being there for him and Claire, for showing him kindness when it was his fault for not watching Sophia, when his little girl had to go through so much pain because of him.
He never managed to say that out loud, though, because all of a sudden his throat felt raw and his eyes burned. He didn’t want to do this now, not when he still had to make sure Claire was all right, to call the funeral home, to somehow contact his Pop and Claire’s parents. Someone needed to go back to the house and pick out a dress for her to wear at the funeral. It should be the pink dress. The one that made her feel like a princess. Sophia loved when he read to her about the princess and the dragons in the little book with the bright pictures that he and Claire found at a thrift store before Sophia was born. “Daddy, more story, more”, she’d beg, trying to avoid naptime. He would always change the ending just for her, spinning tales about a princess who didn’t wait to be saved, who would always find a way to rescue herself. But now there was no one to save his little princess. Her story came to an end before it even began.
The coffee cup slipped from his grasp as he stumbled into a chair. The Nurse moved to take it from him; worried he’d fall. She said his name, quietly first, then louder when he didn’t respond. She held his hand and took his pulse, rubbing his back and reminding him to breathe in and out. He tried to turn away, to have some shred of dignity, but instead he grasped her hand tightly. He tried to stop shaking, take a deep breath, and quiet the panic that was filling his lungs. He didn’t want to break down in front of her, but she was one of the last people who saw his daughter alive, someone else apart from himself and Claire who understood how they just lost something valuable they could never get back. He was vaguely aware of her presence at his side as he finally started to cry. “She’s gone” he gasped out between sobs. There was so much more to say but he couldn’t breathe. “My baby’s really gone”.
His daughter was never coming back. Sophia was gone. Rust would never see his little girl again.