JUNE 1st, 1992, SEATTLE WA

        "HOLY FUCKING SHIT," Chris shouted, clamping her hands over both of her ears. "Can you please turn that thing down?"

"I'm sorry, it's not my fault!" Reagan cried. She was bouncing a screaming Gracie in her arms, her hair sticking up around her face and her eyes wild with desperation. "I don't know what else to do!"

"Dial down the volume knob," Chris hollered. She kept her hands firmly in place over her ears. "Stick her in the icebox or something!"

"Maybe she's right," Robbie said anxiously from his spot on the living room floor of Reagan and Dave's new house. "The cold might calm her down or something. Shock her, you know?" He'd been twirling a pair of Dave's drumsticks between his fingers, practicing the trick that Dave had recently taught him. The practice had been abandoned once Gracie had started screaming.

"I'm not sticking her in the freezer!" Reagan yelled, bouncing Gracie more rapidly now. She knew the real reason as to why her baby was wailing so loudly. Gracie's colic had been acting up, pestering her with gas painful enough to make her face scrunch into a mask of bright red wrinkles.

"Can't you feed her or something?" Chris demanded.

"I already did," Reagan said, exasperated. She'd just finished nursing Gracie an hour earlier. That was before the screaming had started. "I just don't know what else I can do for her."

As much as it was tormenting them both to be there, Reagan was glad that Chris and Robbie were with her. If it weren't for their presence, she would have been going mad with anxiety, wondering if Gracie's screams were indicative of problems that went deeper than just colic. Dave was away that afternoon with Kurt and Krist, tying up loose ends for the European leg of their tour that was slated to start in little less than three weeks.

"I bet it's the new house," Chris said, her voice still leveling at a shout. "The acoustics are too good in here for her to pass up the opportunity of trying them out."

"It's her colic, I'm telling you," Reagan said. She flipped Gracie upright and halfway over her shoulder, patting soothing circles around her lower back. "Her pediatrician warned us about it."

"Want me to hold her?" Robbie offered, getting to his feet. He'd overcome his fear of holding Gracie within recent weeks, finally confident enough (with Reagan's eventual trust) to carry her in his arms. For being so young, Reagan was impressed with how much her little brother cared for Gracie, as if he hadn't been totally wigged out by the mere idea of her existence three months earlier.

"I've got it," Reagan said miserably. She had to be the one to comfort Gracie. When her baby was screaming so bloodcurdlingly loud in her ear, she knew that only she stood a chance at mollifying Gracie's cries into the hushed little pants of a post-newborn meltdown.

It was supposed to have been a pleasant day. Chris had offered to drive into Seattle to help out with the baby while Reagan unpacked the last of her and Dave's belongings. They had just moved into their new house, a two-floored four-bedroom sanctuary that Dave had nabbed in West Seattle. Moving in had gone flawlessly, much to Reagan's surprise with having had Gracie in tow, but the business of unpacking had been hard. Gracie was rarely ever put down, especially by her mother.

Chris had been nice enough to pick up Robbie along the way, knowing how much Reagan missed him. He had had little time of his own to spend with Gracie and Reagan yearned for all the memories that she'd spent with him, just the two of them together as siblings. Kate had taken on the lead role of aunt-in-charge and Reagan didn't want Robbie to feel left out now that he cared so wholeheartedly for his niece. He'd been longing to fit back into the niche of Reagan's life, too.

Their plans had gone to hell. As soon as Gracie had started her crying, they'd all cringed, retiring to the living room as Reagan tried to console her. The boxes had been left abandoned as they all waited anxiously, trying to see what method Reagan would formulate next in order to get her to stop screaming. They had all been fruitless efforts.

Reagan patted Gracie's back rhythmically, tapping her palm firmly in attempt to soothe the pain that she knew must have been crippling for a baby as small as Gracie. It wrenched her heart to see her in such agony knowing that there was nothing she could do to stop it. Gracie's pediatrician had even predicted that because of her premature status, the colic could last up to a few months longer than normal in most newborns.

The phone started ringing in the next room over, prompting Chris to groan.

"That might be Dave," Reagan said. "Can you take her for a second? Just pat her back and bounce her. It helps."

She passed Gracie over to Chris, who held Gracie away from her body with outstretched, uncertain arms.

"Um, I'm not sure that I'm qualified to do this."

"Chris! Support her head! She'll break her neck!"

Chris moaned and curled Gracie into her chest, standing up and replicating the bobbing motion that she'd seen Reagan doing.

"Please stop, please stop," Chris begged weakly.

Reagan darted away from them with one last concerned glance over her shoulder, rushing into the dining room where the landline was. She ripped the phone off the hook and pressed it to her ear, barely catching her breath.

"Hello?"

"Hey baby. Everything going good?" came Dave's cheerful greeting on the other line.

"NO!" Reagan bursted. She clutched at the hair atop her head and tugged on it with fingers that had curled into claws. "Everything is NOT going good!"

"What's the matter?" Dave pressed anxiously. He paused, listening to the sound of Gracie's distant wail in the background. "Is Gracie okay?"

"It's her colic! It's hurting her! I've tried everything," Reagan spluttered. "I can't stop it."

"Oh man, Reags, I'm sorry. The doctor said this is normal though, right?"

"It doesn't feel normal! I don't even remember Kody and Raelynn having it this bad! Dave, I'm going to lose it. It's killing me. It's killing me to hear her cry like this."

"I know baby, I know. Listen, I'm sorry I'm not there. I'll be home in a few hours, okay? We're almost wrapped up here."

No, Reagan thought viciously. You better come home right now.

During Gracie's past bouts with her colic, it had always been Dave who had been the one to calm her down. Reagan wasn't sure if it was his company or touch that soothed her the most, but she had come to figure that it must have been the way Dave approached the situation every time her incessant cries began. He'd rock her in his arms, holding her close to his face as he sang so quietly to her that Reagan could not even hear his song over the din of her screaming. Every time, every single damn time, he had managed to sing her into a tranquility that made it seem like the pain had not even existed in the first place. He could work his magic with Gracie in ways that Reagan could not, something that made her outright envious of him.

"I've got to go," Reagan said. "Chris has her in the living room."

"Shit. Yeah. You better go," Dave said dubiously. Even he knew that Chris was not fond of babies, even if it was one that belonged to her closest friend.

Reagan hung up and made her way back to Chris and Robbie. She felt her chin wobbling under the threat of tears. It wouldn't have made the situation any better if she had started to cry too, but she was beginning to panic. Her irrationalities were telling her to take Gracie to the doctor, even when she knew that it was nothing as serious as her fears told her.

"Was it Dave?" Chris called, still trying to speak over Gracie. She craned her neck away from the baby, as if she too would be plagued with the pain of colic if she got too close.

"Yeah. He'll be home soon." Reagan saw Gracie's face in Chris's arms, pinched tightly and so beet red that she looked close to a nuclear meltdown. A sting of tears caused her to blink her eyes rapidly.

"He could calm her down if he was here," Reagan began to babble, feeling her heart accelerate. "He knows what he's doing. All he has to do is sing to her and touch her and she stops, I can't do that for her, I can't do any of that. I can't sing to her like he does, I don't know how he does it, but it always works and he's not here and —,"

"Reagan, why don't you play for her?" Robbie suggested. He nodded towards Reagan's drum set, assembled aside in the living room and taking up an amount of space that it had never been able to occupy before.

"You want her to drown out this noise with an even louder noise?" Chris cried. "Hell no! No! Reagan, just take her!"

Reagan hesitated though, her eyes zeroing in on the drum set. Ordinarily, she would have dismissed Robbie's idea just as Chris had. Trying to stifle Gracie with the loud ripple of cymbals and the hard beat of a bass drum seemed like the worst idea possible. It probably would have only irritated her further. It would have been nothing like the consoling sound of Dave's crooning voice. Yet, if Dave had found a special musical way to calm her, then maybe Reagan would have to find her own way . . .

She strode over towards the kit, flipping up the back of her long t-shirt that was emblazoned with a faded image of the Space Needle. She sat down on the stool behind the kit, flapping her fingers in Robbie's direction.

"Give me the sticks."

"Reagan," Chris warned as she continued to bounce Gracie with more abandon. "I swear if you start playing, I'm going to stuff your head through one of those toms."

"I'm not going to play anything loud," Reagan said defensively. She was scouring her brain for a song that she could crank out that wouldn't contest with Gracie's crying, but nothing was coming to mind. The first song that popped into her head was 'You My Flower' by the Afghan Wigs, probably because Dave had been hammering it out for fun a few days earlier, but that wouldn't do. Still too heavy.

She tried to mentally skim through a selection of songs that she personally found to be soothing, her thoughts gearing towards the old sixties songs that she had on vinyl. Finally, she settled on the Beatles, figuring that if anyone could manage to play the drums softly in a rock band, it was Ringo Starr.

She launched into the first drum beats of the second verse of 'If I Fell,' trying awkwardly to tap the drumsticks as lightly as possible on the hi-hat while keeping her foot steady on the bass drum pedal. The sound of her playing was loud enough to fill the room, but quiet enough to remain unobtrusive and light. Chris paused, watching as Reagan forged on with anxious eyes set in the direction of her daughter.

Reagan began to hum along to the words as she sang them in her head. She was nervous for Gracie, which did nothing when it came to the shaking of her hands. Reminding herself to play slowly, she composed her nerves, trying to grasp onto the hope that her attempt would work.

Gracie continued to cry loudly. The music that Reagan played was not hushing her, but Chris took the liberty of walking over to the drums where Reagan sat. She knelt down, holding Gracie close to Reagan. Gracie persisted in wailing, her eyes still screwed shut as she cried.

Now entirely desperate, Reagan stepped confidently into the shoes that she knew only Dave had filled before. It was embarrassing for her, singing in front of other people, but she did it anyways. Her voice was no more than a whisper as she sang, trying to mimic the exact way Dave had done it time and time before. Even though she was singing a Beatles song for the occasion, she was not trying to sound like John Lennon for this one — she was doing her best impersonation of Dave Grohl.

Seconds passed and slowly, Gracie's cries dulled to a gentle, hiccuping whimper. The slowing of her cries reminded Reagan of the way a rollercoaster cruised to a stop, fast and out of control until the brakes squealed to an eventual halt. She continued to play and sing, uplifted by the natural color that was returning to Gracie's face.

"Keep going," Chris urged.

As soon as Reagan uttered the final word of her first rendition, she dove straight into the next song that she mentally stumbled upon m, a Neil Young song that Richard had once played for her when she was a child. Thankfully, she recalled the lyrics and sang them faintly, singing to Gracie alone. Gracie's eyes roved the room cautiously as she came down from her crying fit. Soon enough, she was making no sound at all, her small body slack in Chris's arms.

Reagan cut the song off mid-drum beat, lowering the sticks and sighing with relief. She could have cried with happiness. Somehow, she had pulled it off, just in the way that Dave had always done it. Except she'd incorporated the drums into the strange ritual that he shared with Gracie.

Tenderly, Reagan took Gracie from Chris and stood up from the drum stool. She shushed her gently, rocking her in a slow, lazy circle that caused Gracie's eyelids to flutter. She was clearly tuckered out.

"Damn," Robbie said with a shuddering laugh.

Reagan shot him a look. "Language."

He stuck his tongue out at her. "You should be thanking me. It was my idea."

"Shit," Chris sighed heavily. "I haven't been that worried about losing my hearing since the last time I saw the Melvins."

A slick sweat was dripping down Reagan's neck as she rocked Gracie, staring hard at her face and watching as her little chest rose and fell with every breath. She knew then that she would never get used to the fear that something was wrong with her when she cried too loudly or slipped out of her usually docile mood. Everything was at risk when it came to the life that Reagan held in her arms. The reminder of all the boxes that she had to unpack and the tending to the house that was required of her slipped away as she watched Gracie sleep, angelic and peaceful against her chest.

"You're finally smiling," Chris pointed out.

Reagan fought back a giggle. "Yeah, I am. I'm smiling because I can't wait for Dave to come home so that I can tell him I beat him at his own game."

Later that night, Reagan sat on the edge of her and Dave's bed, sifting through one of the last boxes that had been stored in their bedroom. She removed a few picture frames and random trinkets that she had dragged along with her in the move, setting them aside. She hadn't thought it possible, but she had actually managed to settle their belongings in almost every room of the house. The place was finally becoming their own, looking more and more like home with every box that she unpacked.

Dave had put Gracie down himself earlier, settling her into her brand new nursery that had been painted pearl gray and decorated according to a theme of zoo animals. She'd scrapped the room together slowly -- it had been her longest project in the house so far. Together she and Dave had picked out everything from the rocking chair nestled by Gracie's changing table and the spinning mobile above her crib, adorned with tiny lions, zebras and elephants. She hadn't known it before, but she'd been really looking forward to completing Gracie's new room.

Dave joined her at their bedside, strolling in with his hands in his pockets and sheepish smile on his face. He sat down beside her and their legs touched, the bed springs squeaking beneath his added weight.

"Hey," he said casually.

"Hey," Reagan said back. She jostled him with her elbow and he did the same back, each of them nudging harder until Reagan started to laugh and Dave pinned her back against the comforter.

"Gracie okay?" she asked. She ran her fingers through Dave's hair, twisting her fingers amongst the knots at the end.

"Yep, she's out. She had a rough day. Can't blame her."

"She's not the only one," Reagan grumbled.

"Yeah, about that," Dave said, elongating his words as he sat up. He rummaged through his pocket before pulling his fist out, clasped tightly together. He held it out to Reagan.

Her eyes flickered between his hand and his eyes as she sat up too, apprehensively waiting for him to reveal whatever was hidden between his fingers.

"What?" she asked curiously.

"It's a surprise," he said with a shrug. Unfurling his fingers, he revealed Reagan's locket, the very one he had given her in Kurt's old apartment after returning home from tour. Reagan's lips twitched into a smile.

"Are you re-gifting me the locket?"

"No," Dave said, rolling his eyes. "I'm shocked you didn't realize it went missing today."

She touched the space between her collarbones, the hollow dip at the base of her throat where the locket usually rested. Dave was right. It was unusual that she not notice the absence of the locket that she wore during the day, but considering Gracie's episode that afternoon, she wasn't all that miffed by it.

"So what? You're returning it?"

"Open it."

Reagan did as told, prying apart the heart-shaped doors to the locket with her thumbnail. When it opened, she was met with a small picture of Gracie, taken in the hospital after she'd been born. The photo had been sized down and cut precariously to fit against the locket's edges.

"Dave," she whispered. She swore that she felt her heart stutter as she held the locket up closer, recognizing the picture that Dave had snapped days after Reagan had given birth.

"It was a good picture for it," Dave said. "She's so small that any photo of her would fit into that thing. I took it into a jewelry shop after I left Kurt and Krist. The guy there helped me out."

Reagan cupped the locket into her hands and held it to her heart. "I love it. It's perfect."

"I knew you would."

He kissed her, taking the locket from her hands and sweeping aside her hair so that he could put it around her neck. Reagan closed her eyes as she felt his fingers brush against her skin, delicate and soft as they fumbled with the clasp.

It was those little things about Dave that made him so unrealistically perfect to her, abnormal in a world of dreadfully normal people. She had been waiting for the right photo to come along to place in the locket but had forgotten, surprisingly, that the one face that deserved a place in it had finally come along. Of course, of course, Dave would have been the one to remind her of this, acute in ways that Reagan had not properly given him credit for.

He never missed a thing.

a/n: to everyone who commented saying they wanted to see this story continued - thank you 🥺 i cannot put into words what your support means to me. i hope these updates to follow are up to y'all's standards and that you wholly enjoy them. i love you, each and every one of you, forever!