just_1_word | 35.1. Overload
Pat smiled at his godson sitting in his lap and trying to wrap his little drooly lips around Pat’s shiny wedding ring. Pat had no issues with drool and was well used to the littlest Campbell trying to gnaw on his fingers. There was a lot drool and red cheeks, but still no tooth to show for it. He brushed his free hand over Riley’s baby fine blond hair and bounced him gently on his leg. Lachlan was at the bar with the band trying desperately to get his head around a couple of new songs in the works, so Tara had asked if Pat minded coming over to watch RJ for an hour or so while she battled through the piles of baby laundry that had collected with RJ’s teething. He had more wet nappies than usual and she didn’t want them clogging up the diaper pails for anything more than a day. Pat had a terrible night's sleep the night before and an even more draining morning at work, but he was happy to watch his godson, knowing he was never a hassle to take care of.
He was relieved RJ wasn’t crying at that point, though. His head was pounding and making him feel a little nauseous. In fact, he was getting a sense of vertigo, despite the fact he was sitting down, and his grip on the baby secured just a little. “We might need to get you in your buggy, wee man,” he murmured, standing up and nursing Riley in his arms. That was probably a mistake as the room felt like it dipped around him and he stumbled, only just managing not to fall over. All he could focus on was RJ and he managed to get him to the buggy by the sofa, lowering him into it carefully.
The baby boy started to cry loudly, whether it was because he sensed something was wrong or he was protesting being put down. “Tara-” Pat tried to call out, but the words weren’t forming easily on his tongue. He didn’t have much time to realise that maybe the bad night’s sleep and the crap day might have been indicating he was rapidly veering for an abrupt and unexpected attack. Sometimes, there just was no warning, and now it was all coming in a rush before he had a chance to do anything about it. The prickly pins and needles sensation started to sharply make itself known in his fingers and up his arm, but he could hardly place it through the dizziness. He lost feeling in his legs, feeling like he just plunged them into a pool of icy water and the blackness crawled into his peripheral vision. He blacked out, hitting the floor hard beside the baby buggy, his godson now sobbing loudly inside.
All muses referenced with permission and are from the princeton2nyc universe
Word Count | 460