#reyna

It took Reyna an embarrassingly long time to recognize one of the kindest things anyone had ever done for her. In her defense, it was a very quiet act, easy to miss from anyone, but especially from Piper. Piper, who spoke every love language like it was her mother tongue. Piper, who loved bright and loud and unabashed where everyone could see. Piper, who had gone out of her way to be kind to Reyna at every opportunity and made sure there was no doubt that she was loved by the most genuine person on the face of the earth. 

The fact of the matter was that Reyna didn't like kissing. She didn't dislike it, exactly, and there were some aspects that she liked. She liked being close to Piper, both physically and emotionally, and she liked being able to provide a service that made her girlfriend happy. It just wasn't something she actively sought out on her own. It was, as she had explained more than once, akin to Piper’s willingness to watch Gray's Anatomy with her, despite finding it a bit dull. Piper liked kissing, and Reyna liked medical dramas. These were two facts of equal importance in Reyna’s book. 

Only it didn't stay equal forever. One day, during their fourth month of dating, Piper leaned in and Reyna realized that she was eager to be kissed. She had been so startled by that epiphany that she'd forgotten to kiss Piper back and asked to start over. When she finally realized what it was that had changed, what had turned kissing from an accommodation to an enjoyment, she had to slow the world down for a moment to process it.

It started one day when Piper was helping her explore the wide, terrifying world of preferences. It wasn’t like Reyna didn’t know what preferences were – she had her favorite bakery in New Rome and there was one particular set of pegasus tack that she always reached for – but wrestling with the idea that she could and should have preferences on just about everything was a bit of a challenge. So Piper, naturally, had turned it into a game. She’d pick something random, then get as many different types of that thing as she could put her hands on, and Reyna would try them and rank them based on how much she liked it. It was a fun, simple concept, and one Reyna found great enjoyment in. It was the reason she found out she liked medical dramas and knee-length skirts and the color maroon and the one specific brand of mechanical pencils with the little plastic grippers.

It was also the reason she found out that her favorite candy was Mentos, specifically the strawberry flavor. Piper had supplied them on candy day, half as a joke because whose favorite candy was breath mints? The answer, naturally, was Reyna. She wasn’t quite sure what it was that she liked about them. They didn’t taste like real strawberries, they weren’t rich like chocolate, and eating more than a few of them at a time made her teeth hurt and they had no objective redeeming qualities. Reyna had been frantically trying to justify her choice, but Piper just laughed at her and told her that she wasn’t a defendant. Sometimes preferences didn’t make sense, and they didn’t have to. Reyna liked strawberry Mentos because she liked strawberry Mentos and if anyone had anything to say about it, they were more than welcome to take it up with Piper. 

That was the thing about Piper. She loved unapologetically, and the thing she was best at loving was Reyna. It scared Reyna sometimes, how much she loved Piper, and she was even more scared of how much Piper loved her. Love had always, always been dangerous waters in Reyna’s life (she’d loved her father who went mad, she’d loved her sister who abandoned her, she’d loved Jason who was taken from her, and then Venus herself had all but cursed her) but Piper, brilliant and beautiful and the daughter of the goddess who tormented Reyna her whole life, jumped into love with both feet, eyes shut. Once, in the middle of a sticky summer night when their bedsheets clung to their bodies, Reyna had asked how she could do it. How she could love without fear and hesitation, knowing that love was little more than a loaded gun pressed into a potential enemy’s hand. 

Piper had gone still and quiet at her question and stared at the ceiling, pursing and puckering her lips like she was chewing on her words before she spoke them. “You might hurt me one day.”

“I don’t want to.”

“But you could, anyone you love can hurt you, even if they don’t mean to.” She smiled and her eyes glittered like the stars she loved so much. “That doesn’t mean I have to love them any less before it happens.”

“How can you say that?” Reyna pressed, brows furrowing. “You just… accept that it will end, and it might end in heartbreak.”

Piper shrugged. “Everything ends. You still get super invested in every episode of Gray’s Anatomy even though you know it has a time limit. This is the same thing, just ever so slightly more important.”

Reyna’s cheeks flushed. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Aw, but I’m so good at it,” Piper grinned. Then she leaned forward and kissed Reyna and Reyna sort of forgot all about her questions because she noticed something for the very first time because for the very first time she wasn’t braced for impact.

Piper’s kisses tasted sweet. She didn’t mean that metaphorically, either. She meant that Piper’s mouth tasted like sugar and wheat syrup and artificial strawberries, and suddenly the past two and a half months were put in sharp relief. Reyna had dismissed it, over and over again, but Piper almost always had a tube or cup or bag of strawberry Mentos on hand whenever they were together, despite the fact that she didn’t particularly care for them. Reyna had observed the kindness, and appreciated it as a gift. She had never, not even once considered that it might, in fact, be an act of service, too.

That was the fact that Reyna took her time processing. Piper ate strawberry Mentos (and a good deal of them, if Reyna’s posthumous observation was to be trusted) simply because she wanted her kisses to taste like Reyna’s favorite candy. Reyna’s instincts reached for the simple explanation that it was an accident, a coincidence, a blessing of Fate. But that wasn’t true, it would never be true, and she knew it. Piper McLean was a lot of things, but above all she was incredibly deliberate when it came to love. This was something she did on purpose, not because she’d been asked or to be thanked, but because she had decided that Reyna deserved sweetness in her life. It wasn’t a debt she was holding over Reyna’s head, even Reyna understood that, but it was one she intended to repay anyway.

The next day, Reyna pressed Piper’s hands between her own, and said she would be stepping out for an errand that afternoon and set out on her mission. Piper had never told Reyna her favorite candy, but Reyna knew it anyway because she’d heard Leo make fun of her for it. It took longer than she had expected to find a candy shop in San Francisco that met her standards, but Reyna eventually left the store, a paper bag clutched triumphantly in her fist. When she made it home, Piper leaned in to kiss her like always and Reyna leaned in, too. Piper went still for a moment before she laughed a quiet, incredulous laugh and kissed Reyna again.