Love Will Find A Way ( FreenxBecky)

Epilogue

Freen falls back against the couch, exhausted.

It's on days like this that she let herself be tired, even as she gets up to do what's needed.

Truth is, she's too young to feel as old as she does, running after Patricia and trying to get her to behave, or keeping up with Billy's soccer practices, but she promised Becky.

"Mom? Have you seen my backpack?" August yells, and Freen closes her eyes. "It's on my desk!"

She'd promised to help him look at college applications tonight, so that's another thing on her plate today. Sometimes she can't believe he's 16, and leaving the nest soon enough. She trembles in fear of the day Billy and Patricia follow in his footsteps.

"Found it!" August's yell comes from the other side of the house, and Freen smiles to herself.

It might be a messy one, but their house did function like a well oiled machine. It was needed, especially now.

She promised Becky.

"Mama!" Patricia yells, jumping on top of her, and Freen gasps even as she laughs.

"What's gotten into you?" Freen asks, rubbing her daughter's back.

"It's too loud, I can't do my homework."

Freen smiles.

A 1st grader's homework was mostly colouring with a bit of writing simple words, but Patricia took it seriously.

Patricia really loved school, she took after Becky that way, biology be damned. But she had a talent with painting that was all Freen too.

She was still surprised at how much of her she could see in their daughter.

/f/

They wait outside.

The doctors don't really speak much, but every once in a while a nurse will walk by and help them whatever news there are.

Freen feels like the surgery takes too long, sitting as she is on the cold tiled floor of the hospital, her youngest children beneath each of her arms and her oldest pacing the room from one side to the other, over and over again.

Freen feels like Schrodinger's cat, trapped in two realities for as long as she doesn't know her wife's fate on the other side of the metal double doors.

Does her family miraculously get to live through this intact? Or does she return home with her children broken, a single mother with her wife in a bag?

She tries to be strong for August, Billy and Patricia, but even they must sense her trepidation because she can't calm them down, nor quiet their demands to see their other mother.

Still, they have to wait.

Billy and Patricia doze through it at times, and even August sits down, tired of his pacing, but Freen isn't able to do anything but stare at the doors, waiting patiently for news that will either save her or break her.

It feels endless.

But when it's over, finally, it's only been three hours.

/f/

"You can come do your homework here," she tells Patricia, pointing to the coffee table.

Pattern shakes her head.

"Can you just tell him to shut up?" She begs, and Freen laughs despite herself at the 6-year-old's strong words.

"Pat don't-"