Who: Wren and Evie What: Sads. Endless sads. So many sads. Where: The house When: After Will's "party" Warnings/Rating: Sads?
It had been the longest week of Evie’s young life. She’d been through some things, things that would have destroyed people and she’d come out on the other side okay. Even as a little girl she had a certain resilience about her that was unparalleled. She was strong and smart and completely capable of navigating the incredibly rough waters life sometimes had. But never in her life had she ever felt so disconnected from reality as she had this week. There was a heavy feeling throughout her entire body that made every little task a thousand times harder. She found herself thinking carefully just to produce words and sentences and thoughts, everything had been done with organized grace and and an eerie calmness.
Evie couldn’t say it was a blur, it wasn’t, she remembered every minute detail with vivid clarity. She relived every moment of every day over and over again in her head. Every relative she had to call, she knew what she had said to each and every one of them. Every question from the police, every question from the medical examiner and every conversation she’d had to have since the minute her Will had died in some strange place all by himself.
It felt like Evie was dragging ten tons of rocks behind her with every move she made, and this might have been enough to bury her if it weren’t for the eleven and a half pound princess that currently occupied Evie’s attention. No matter how hard it was to get up and start moving Daisy needed her to. Her Daisy. Will’s Daisy. The only thing that made any sense in the whole world was the only thing keeping Evie moving. She wanted to be a mother and a woman that Daisy would find strength from when she needed it, and she wouldn’t be able to do that without getting them through this life they’d been handed.
It had been a few hours since Evie’s “Celebration of Life Party” she’d held in honor of Will. She couldn’t have standed a funeral with all the black and the speeches and sunglasses. Her father’s funeral had been very traditional and sad. She hadn’t walked away with a sense of closure. It was hard to mourn an oversized photograph of her father amongst his peers while everyone told stories about Benedict and then gathered at a stuffy old mansion for cocktails. Evie had been grateful for the help of his business partners, but it had all gotten away from her. And it had left her feeling more empty than any funeral should have.
Evie wasn’t going to suffer that again. And she wasn’t going to suffer fools who told her she was doing it wrong. Will had been cremated and put into a lovely and low key urn and was currently sitting on Evie’s nightstand in the guest room at Wren and Luke’s. But he hadn’t been at his party. It hadn’t been that kind of party. It was held outside under lovely tents. No one had been allowed to wear black, the music had been good. The hugs had been better. And the speeches had been full of joy. There had been toasts and they watched the sunset, Evie had cried with those who needed to cry. She’d cried on her own in the bathroom, she’d showed Daisy off and thanked more people for their support than she could count.
Will’s family had been there, all of a sudden very interested in Daisy and Evie’s well being. Will hadn’t been close with them, but Evie had always tried to keep them updated. Especially since Daisy had been born, she was always sending emails and photographs, text messages and videos of Will making her smile. Videos she still watched on her phone when she was by herself and pretended not to notice the look on Daisy’s face if she ever heard Will on a phone message or a video. She didn’t know if was good or bad for her daughter, and supposed she’d call the doctor (would he even know?) the next day. At least she had something planned to accomplish.
Evie didn’t know what she would do if she had nothing to do. She’d been dreading this day, this day when everything would be done and sorted and there were no more calls to make and no more plans to make. No more meetings to attend or flowers to smell and no more pink dresses to pick out. But she’d call the doctor in the morning, that was something to do. Something to move for.
For now Evie wasn’t moving. It was dark outside, and the warm desert air was wafting over her skin as she sat on Wren and Luke’s patio with a bottle of white wine with one glass gone and one more halfway there sitting next to her. The baby monitor was on the table and she had been sitting in the quiet listening to her baby breathe and trying to wrap her mind around anything, trying to hold on to something.
Evie was wearing the pink sundress she’d worn to the party earlier, the only difference were she had no shoes on. And she was also smoking a cigar. One of her Papa’s that she’d found when she’d been cleaning out the Las Vegas apartment when they’d first moved here. And now she’d have to clean it out all over again. She hadn’t been back yet. Asking Wren, Luke, or Jack or her colleagues from work to pick up what she needed. She knew she had to get Daisy back to normalcy, but she didn’t even know what that meant anymore. What the hell was god damn normal if Will wasn’t there?
She heard the patio door open and she turned to look behind her and saw Wren at the door, “Don’t worry. This isn’t as bad as it looks. The downward spiral isn’t starting,” Evie said putting the cigar out because Wren had a baby to think about and Evie wasn’t about to smoke a smelly cigar with her pregnant best friend breathing distance.
Wren was tired. The entire week had been exhausting, and she really had no idea how Evie was managing it. She could only look at her friend and imagine herself in the same place, and she was pretty sure no one would even be able to get her out of bed, not even for Gus. It made her feel really, really weak, but it also made her appreciate how very, very strong Evie was. She'd watched her throughout the party that day, and she'd realized that Evie would make it. Somehow, she'd make it. She'd make sure Daisy grew up remembering her père, and Wren thought that was the strongest thing, because she couldn't even imagine how hard that would be. She didn't want to imagine in.
About to enter her fifth month, and finally on some prenatal vitamins and some supplements for when she couldn't keep food down, Wren was finally putting on some decent weight, and she was pretty sure she'd started showing overnight. Dressed in an old, softly worn yellow sundress, she padded out onto the patio with Finch at her heels and Cygne on a beeline for the nearest corner of the yard that she could try to dig an escape hole from. She sat down across from her friend, and she eyed the wine with envy. Getting drunk would be so very nice, but she couldn't, and she found she missed that oblivion.
"You're allowed to spiral," Wren told Evie, just as soon as she'd settled in the chair, one bare foot tucked beneath her and a ball tossed to the overactive puppy to keep her from escaping. "We'll always tug you back," she promised, and she gave Evie a tired, fond smile. "The party was beautiful," she said simply, the compliment earnest and her grey eyes going a little wet around the corners. "I don't know how you managed it," she said truthfully, and she leaned forward and stretched her arm around the table and squeezed Evie's fingers.
Evie’s smile back at her friend didn’t meet her eyes at all, but she wanted to try. She held Wren’s tightly in her own. And closed her eyes for a long moment and took some deep breaths. “I don’t know how either,” she said softly. “Oh God.” She said having another moment of overwhelming emotion. “I’ve never felt like this before,” she pursed her lips and exhaled slowly. “Sometimes it doesn’t feel real at all and sometimes it’s so real I can feel myself drowning in it.”
Inside, the television hummed quietly, something on Discovery Nature that Gus had fallen asleep to, and Wren scooted her chair closer to Evie carefully. She squeezed Evie's fingers back, and she raised her other hand and smoothed Evie's blonde hair away from her face. "You can drown if you need to. You'll surface, and we'll pull you back if you don't," she promised, repeating the sentiment, because she was pretty sure she would start crying and never stop, if it was her in Evie's place. "I'm not even going to bother saying it'll get better, but I will say you'll get through it, for Daisy."
Evie closed her eyes and leaned into Wren’s touch on her hair. She was happy to drown, but so scared. She’s drowned before, her father had pulled her back. But she’d said that would never be her again. She was terrified at how appealing it all sounded. “It’s so heavy I can’t breathe, Wren. What if she can feel that? She misses him, I know she does. I can’t give her what she needs all by myself. I’m so scared for her.”
"You can give her what she needs," Wren said with absolutely certainty. If anything happened to her, she knew Luke could be as good a parent without her as he was with her, no matter what he said about not being able to continue on. And she knew Evie could do the same. "You'll be fine, once you're ready to be, baby," she said, fingers soothing as they dragged through Evie's hair. "And we're here in the meantime, and she'll always have Will's family and us, and you. And you'll be perfect. You'll tell her about him, and it'll be like he's right there, because he kind of will be." Wren had grown up Catholic-Creole, and she believed in something after this life, even if it was something she didn't talk about very often.
Evie wanted to believe Wren, but she didn’t. Not today. Maybe tomorrow. But not right now. And she knew Wren would understand that, so she didn’t argue. But she didn’t suck it up either. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to think or say. I miss him, Wren. I miss him so much. I don’t know how people survive this.”
Wren had no response to that, nothing that wasn't tears, and she was crying before she even realized it. She couldn't even blame her hormones, because she would have cried even if she wasn't pregnant. Will was a good, good man, and he'd loved Evie, and Evie still loved him, and if that wasn't worth crying over, then nothing was. She just leaned forward in her chair, and she wrapped her arms around her friend tightly, hugging her and rubbing her back. She made soothing sounds, quiet ones that were meant to console, with a few French words thrown in. "I know. Je sais, bebe. Je sais."
Evie laid her head on Wren’s shoulder and hugged her back and cried. She didn’t know what else to do. Sometimes she knew there wasn’t much else to be done but cry. And she accepted this as one of those moments. “Wren, I don’t know what I’d be doing without you.” And she meant it. It wasn’t the first time she’d said it, and she was forever grateful that she had Wren and Luke in her life. They had taken her in immediately and without question. Luke had done more than anyone else would do.
"You don't ever have to worry about that, because I'm not going anywhere," Wren assured, tucking a strand of blonde behind one of Evie's ears. "Neither is Luke. You're stuck with us, and so is Daisy," she promised. It felt nice, she realized, to actually be able to say the right thing to a friend for once. It was so easy with Evie, in the same way that it was never, ever easy with MK. "Anyway, I'll drive you crazy by the end of the year," she promised, because she'd never actually had a baby of her own to take care of, and she had a feeling Evie wouldn't mind the distraction during the holidays this year. "We love you," she said easily, because it was true.
“I love you too,” Evie said hugging her friend tightly and letting herself cry. Because she was safe here, and she knew she could. She could drink wine and smoke cigars and even if she did spiral a little she’d be okay. She thought she’d be okay even if she spiraled a lot. But she didn’t want to confuse Daisy anymore than she already was. Which meant she couldn’t live here forever either. She pulled back slightly, and she couldn’t keep her face in any expression other than defeated. “When I go home, I’m probably going to make you, Luke, and Jack do shifts to keep me from going crazy,” she said more than half serious. “I’m really going to miss him, Wren. I’m scared. I’ve never been so scared.” And that was saying something.
"We'll stay as long as you need us to, whenever you need us to," Wren said, feeling safe in making the promise for her and Luke and Jack. She understood Evie would want to go home eventually, but she also understood that home would be really, really sad, whether it was the house Evie had shared with Will or someplace all new. She pulled back a little bit, and her fingers traced soothing lines along her friend's cheek. "You're one of the strongest people I know, and you'll be okay, but it's okay to be scared, Evie. It's really, really okay right now. You be as scared as you need to, and you miss him as much as you need to, and know that we're just outside the door, or just a call away, okay? And we're not going to let anything happen to you or Daisy. You're not ever, ever alone." And for a little girl who had grown up all by herself, that was a really big promise.
Evie nodded, and tried to believe everything her friend was telling her. She knew on some level it had to be okay. People went through this all the time - she just didn’t know how they did it. What strength they found to cope with it. She didn’t know where to find that.
“Wren,” she said clearing her throat after a moment. “For a couple of years in our relationship I wondered what I would do in this situation. The times that things got really bad and I didn’t see him for a while. I wondered how I would react when I got the call from the police or the hospital that something terrible had happened. Or that he’d done something terrible to himself. I would just lay there in an empty bed wondering if I was ever going to see him again and wondering what that meant for me. But we got through it. He got through it, and I stopped being scared. I stopped wondering, I stopped preparing for it. I let my guard down. And here I am anyway.”
Wren was glad Evie didn't ask how people got through it, because she had no idea, and she didn't think she'd be able to lie her way through it. Instead, she gave Evie time to start talking again, and she tucked long strands of blonde hair behind Evie's ears over and over, soothing. "I know what that's like. I do it all the time," she admitted of lying in bed and wondering what she would do if Luke died. And with all this, she was thinking about it more and more and more, and it just scared her a little bit more each time. She didn't know what to say about Evie letting her guard down and something bad blindsiding her, because that was her own fear about nearly every single thing in her life just then. She bit her lip, and she gave Evie a sad, sad smile. "I don't know what the right thing to say is," she admitted. "I don't think there are any words that can take your hurt away, or that can even make it a little better," she said sadly.
Evie closed her eyes for just a bit and her sigh was completely resigned but she understood. She knew that there were only so many words to say and she didn’t even know what they were half the time. She looked at Wren and nodded. “I don’t think there are either,” she said finally. She finished her glass of wine rather quickly and as she sat up a bit straighter to pour herself another glass a very familiar noise came through the baby monitor and Evie smiled slightly in spite of everything. She waited for a few seconds to see if it was a false alarm, clearly pleased when it wasn’t. No one wanted their baby to cry, but Evie didn’t mind the excuse to hold her one bit. “Impeccable timing as per usual.”
Wren glanced toward the monitor, and she looked at her friend when Daisy didn't stop crying. She squeezed Evie's fingers, as Evie stood. "I'll be inside in a little bit," she promised, and she listened as the patio door closed, and then she took a long, deep breath. This was so hard, and holding it up wasn't very easy, not when all she wanted to do was cry or lie on the couch. Footsteps behind her made her turn, and she smiled when she saw Gus biting his lip at the door. "Viens ici, bebe," she said motioning him forward and letting him crawl onto her lap. He was getting too big for it, but she didn't care just then.