3:7 Goodbye pt. I

"Baby bwuvver, baby bwuvver!" Luis chanted at Madisons stomach. She had told him about the pregnancy before she'd started to show, and explained that meant he'd be a big brother. Luis was in the 'Why?' stage, and it had taken a long time, and a lot of patience to get him to understand what being a brother was.
"You don't know that, what if it's a baby sister?" Madison laughed, scooping the three year old into the air and spinning him above her head.
"I only have bwuvver." Luis demanded, looking angry at his mothers suggestion, before bursting into fits of giggles at being waved around in the air.
"We'll see." Madison said, putting him back on the ground. "Lets pack some more toys so that daddy doesn't think we've been playing all day." Geoffrey, Madison and Luis were moving to the new house in 2 days, and Madison was itching to go. She still had 2 months until the new baby arrived, but couldn't wait to get out and get the new house set up ready for its arrival.

Packing took a long time, as Luis insisted on playing with each toy before packing it away, and Madison soon got frustrated and decided to put him down for a nap.


_____

She could barely remember the rest of the afternoon and early evening, and wasn't a hundred percent sure how she'd arrived at the hospital. She was crying. She knew Taylor had come home, or she wouldn't have left, but her mind was a blur as she looked at the man she loved lying on the hospital bed.

He looked peaceful now, almost as though he was just sleeping, but the gown, wires, and steady beeping of the heart monitor reminded Madison that this wasn't just her fiance asleep. This was real, this was serious.

She thought she saw him move as she sat on the bed, but it must've been her moving him as the bed sunk beneath her weight. She rested a hand on his chest, and felt for his familiar steady heartbeat beneath her palm. The heartbeat she found was wrong. Mechanical, too perfect. The machines were keeping it going, and the rythm was different. He didn't feel like Geoffrey.

Madison was locked in her head, only seeing him, only hearing the machines in the small cubicle, and not noticing the doctors and nurses running around between other patients, not hearing the sobs of other people in similar situations, not listening to the emergency rooms' phone constantly ringing. To her it was as if they were the only two there.

A doctor came in, and insisted she wait in the waiting area for half an hour while they ran some more tests and pumped more medicine into him. She was glad to not have to watch it, but hated leaving his side.

Taylor arrived with Luis not long after. She had hoped to give Luis to her own parents for the night, but hadn't been able to get hold of them. Luis didn't need to see this, and she only hoped he was still too young to understand.

When she found her sister in the waiting room, she noted how terrified she looked. She didn't blame her, she had no idea what she was going through, and hoped to never have to experience it either. She put Luis down to better comfort her sister, but soon realised she didn't know what she could say or do.

Madison seemed frozen to the spot. She was biting her nails, a habit she'd never had before, and hadn't seemed to notice her sister and son arriving.

She soon realised, and shifted her position as Luis toddled over to her.
"Mummy, why you cwy?" He asked. She couldn't look at him, and instead started staring at the floor between her feet. She couldn't tell him why she was crying, not while there was a chance that nothing would happen and his father would come home.
"It's nothing, Luis."
"Is it fwom baby?" Madison looked at her son, confused. "Fwom my baby bwuvver makin you cwy?"
"No, Luis, nothing like that..." At that moment, a doctor walked in and told them they could go to see Geoffrey.

When Madison stood up, she felt a painful twinge in her stomach. She carried on as though nothing had happened, she wasn't due for another couple of months, and she knew Taylor would force her home if she knew. Just before entering Geoffreys cubicle, while Taylor was focusing on stopping Luis from running off, she touched her stomach, it was rock solid. She didn't have time for labour now, she decided she'd just ignore it until her waters broke.

Geoffrey hadn't moved, besides where the doctors had moved his arms slightly. It was all new to Madison, she'd never seen this kind of thing before. Taylor, on the other hand, after being in the police force for a few years now, had seen her fair share of coma patients before. It didn't make seeing someone she knew in this situation; the love of her baby sisters life, any easier though.

Taylor sat Luis on a chair, and sat on the other herself. She had doubts about it being a good idea Luis being here, but she wasn't going to leave Madison alone. What if something happened to Geoffrey, and she was here alone at the time? Surely the stress would hurt the baby, and she may even snap and go missing. She knew it wasn't like her sister to do that, she'd never leave Luis, but grief can change a person. She'd seen that kind of thing happen enough in her short career, and it was hard to separate home and work sometimes.

Taylor looked at her watch. It was getting late, and she was surprised by how long they'd been sitting there in silence for. It wasn't like Luis to be this quiet. Either he could sense nobody felt like talking, or he was really tired.

She picked her young nephew up, and turned to her sister.
"Madison, you should come home. You need to get some sleep and I'll tell the doctors that if anything happens, anything, then they should ring us and we'll be right here. There's nothing you can do for him here, and you know he wouldn't want you to stay here all night." Madison nodded. She didn't want to leave Geoffreys side, but she knew she had to go home and eat something at least. She would come back first thing tomorrow. She wasn't going to leave him here to die alone.



:'( I'm sorry, really I am. I planned this before everyone fell in love with him, and it has been really hard to not collapse in fits of apology whenever anyone mentioned him in a comment.




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