37. Wild
What they have… it's raw.
It's raw and untamable. It's wild passion and peaceful afternoons and neither of them get sick of it. They have their fights- yelling and screaming at one another, throwing empty vases to smash against the wall, accusations of stupid, meaningless crimes, but it's okay.
Because what they have… it's real.
They both know it and they both treasure it. That's why, even when they fight, neither of them ever storms out or threatens to leave- they know it would be impossible, unthinkable, to be without one another now. Maybe before, earlier, they would have managed- scraped by with only memories to haunt them. Now they're in too deep. Their hearts are consumed by one another and its foolishness to try to delude themselves into thinking they could live- not merely survive, but actually live- without each other at their side.
So when Reyna gets the phone call from Piper- "Leo's just been brought into the hospital, he's been in a car crash"- it's a deep, staggering blow.
Because even the gods, even the Fates, could not be so cruel as to rip them away from one another now.
Reyna gets there, not remembering the drive. She meets Piper in her nurse's scrubs and tries to listen but all of her words are coming as if Reyna's just been drugged- she doesn't understand.
The hospital smells bad. Like antiseptic and sick and clean and Reyna doesn't like it.
She wants home. Leo. She wants to smell car oil, or gasoline. She wants the smell of lasagna, her favourite food, his best dish, and wants to see a fresh pan waiting for her to get home from her lawyers office with him in an apron standing proudly behind it.
She does not want to see Piper walk into the room Leo is currently in, lying on an operating table.
She does not want to see the shocked, grief-stricken pale face of one of her best friends walking back out of same room in a daze.
Because she knows what that means. And she knows, by the painful thump of her slowing heart, that there is absolutely nothing she can do.
It must have been frightful, she reflects later, to witness what came over her at that moment. Reyna was no longer happy and wild with glee and love- she was a mindless, desperate wife who yells and screams, thrashes and kicks to try to get into the operating room because if she can get there, if she can make it, Leo might wake up.
For her. She's the only one who could do it and goddamn it, why were they restraining her and dragging her away when she was supposed to be moving forward?
Her husband was in there.
Reyna must have been too violent, too crazed. A needle filled with sedative jabs into her neck. She's overcome with grief so sharp, so poignant, while her blood trudges through her veins, her brain numbs and her heart breaks into tiny little pieces.
Nobody but Leo could pick them up.
But Leo isn't here anymore.
How, Reyna wonders, staring out of the hospital window, is it possible for something like this to have happened in one day?
How is it possible to lose the only thing you care about and have your life completely turned upside down in only one day?
Nobody is left to answer her questions.