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And Dance with Me

A companion piece to Hold My Hand

a story by Ryeloza

Part Two: Leo

One

Before the Depression cost his father his job and required the entire Wyatt family to find more creative hobbies to support their livelihood, Leo and his sister Mariella took dance classes on Thursday nights. Mrs. George ran the classes in her living room and rarely smiled. As the youngest boy there, Leo was forced to pair with Mrs. George's granddaughter, Beth, who was a year younger than him and also there out of family duty rather than pleasure.

One Thursday, Mariella was ill and Leo was tasked with walking to Mrs. George's by himself. While plodding along he came across Beth, who also trudged to class with her head hung. When he greeted her, she halted and slowly, reluctantly, raised her head to look at him. Her eyes filled with tears and as she turned he saw that her dress was covered in mud and grass stains.

"My brothers pushed me in the mud," she explained between hiccupping sobs. "They decided to go fishing instead of coming to class and when I said I wanted to come they shoved me and I fell. And now Grandma is going to yell at me."

"Oh," said Leo, who really didn't understand much about brothers or mean grandmothers. He bit his lip, thoughtful for a moment. "Well we could do something even better than fishing. And a lot better than dance class."

"Really?"

Leo nodded. "Sure. Come on."

So instead of class, there was a motion picture and ice cream and laughing.

Leo didn't mind when he had to quit dancing.

Two

They danced to French music at their wedding.

Leo's mother was French and Lillian was in awe of all things French, so it only seemed fitting. When he was deployed to the South Pacific instead of to Europe he almost felt disappointed that he would never step foot in France. After, he was grateful: had his death occurred in France certainly the lovely connotations would have been ruined for Lillian.

As it was, his new life began in France as his first charge lived in Paris. And the city was beautiful and brilliant, just as he had always believed.

Just as they had always believed.

It was everything he had lost and he hated it.

For the rest of his days, he became teary-eyed whenever he heard "La Vie en Rose."

Three

He had a charge—a future Whitelighter—named Letty Greal who had laughing green eyes and a mess of wildly curly blonde hair. He didn't see her often because she didn't often need him; her life, as people were apt to say, was somewhat charmed. She had the big house and the wonderful husband and the adoring children; the job she loved and the friends who always had time for her. But when things began to fall apart, Leo was there to pick up the pieces.

The youngest child died in a car crash and, in his favorite guise as a handyman, Leo began to spend more and more time with Letty. It was hard. It was hard to see her look ragged and broken. It was hard to see her cry. It was hard to see her broken. Most of all, it was excruciating to not be able to tell her who he really was and what she was destined to become.

To give her hope.

"John and I are getting divorced," she told him quietly in the kitchen one morning.

"I'm sorry," Leo said. And he was. He had seen them before, their happiness, and it was just another loss in their lives.

She was quiet for a moment. "Do you think it's possible to move on from what happened? John told me that it's like I died too, and I know that's true. I feel like I died too. But how are you supposed to keep living after…after something like that?"

Leo stopped tinkering and turned to look Letty in the eye. "You can only live for yourself," he said quietly. "So you look for some other meaning in your life, never forgetting what you lost, but moving forward all the same."

"Did you lose someone too?"

Leo paused for a long moment, but Letty didn't back down from the question and she seemed to know that he needed the time, even when he turned away from her and back to his work.

"Yes," he finally said. "I lost my whole family, actually."

He doesn't add that he doesn't think he could survive this for a second time.

Four

For months his and Piper's only relationship revolved around working at the club together. The club was a place of conflicting emotions: pleasure and pain; joy and agony. After, once Dan was gone and life was perfect if only for a minute, they began to go to P3 just to hang out and the connotations changed; ambivalence went out the window.

Still, it was to his detriment one night when Piper took him by the hand and said, "Let's dance."

The music was fast and thumping and Piper danced like everyone else did while Leo stood awkwardly and tried to find a groove. Piper looked at him curiously, eyebrow crooked, and said, "What? You don't like dancing?"

"This isn't dancing," he said stubbornly. Capturing her hands in his, forcing her to still her jilted movements, he pulled her into a traditional frame that would have made Mrs. George proud. "This is dancing."

Piper laughed as he led her in tiny circles—there was no room to move on the dance floor.

Five

Their marriage was an elaborate dance that neither he nor Piper knew the steps to, so there were many stumbles and missteps and awkward times when she went to twirl and he was left spinning in another direction. In these moments he sometimes felt as though he'd been abandoned on the dance floor; left alone in a spotlight with no way to see beyond the stage. No way to see back to her.

It was the most frightening feeling. Hopelessness.

Then the spotlight dimmed and the stage lights came on, soft and beautiful and he could find her again: an exquisite vision, perhaps just as lost as he, but there and real and perfect.

So he took her hand, and they began again.