Keifer pov
The silence was worse than the storm.
The emergency bay doors had hissed shut, cutting off the sound of the rain, but it couldn't drown out the echoes of C in's voice. She's gone. We lost her. I stood in the center of the hallway, my boots leaving bloody, muddy tracks on the white linoleum. My hands were empty. For the first time in six months, I wasn't holding a child. I wasn't holding my wife. I was just holding onto the air where they used to be.
"Sir, you need to step back."
A nurse was trying to move me, her hand on my arm. I didn't even look at her. I couldn't move. My eyes were locked on the red "Occupied" light above Trauma Room 1, where they had taken Aurora. And then I looked to the left, where the team was frantically bagging Jay.
Reality didn't feel like a nightmare. Nightmares have a logic. Nightmares have an end. This was just cold, hard, unmoving fact.
I watched through the glass as they ripped Jay's shirt open to place the paddles. Her body—the body I had spent every night of the last half-year protecting—was being jolted by electricity.
"Clear!" the doctor yelled.
Jay's body arched off the table. It was a violent, ugly movement. She looked like a puppet with its strings cut.
"The shock triggered a massive cardiac event," C in said, appearing beside me. He looked like he had aged twenty years in twenty minutes. He was leaning against the wall, his hands shoved into his lab coat pockets to hide the shaking. "It's Takotsubo, Keifer. Broken Heart Syndrome. Her heart literally couldn't handle the trauma of losing Aurora. The muscle is stunned. It's failing."
"Fix it," I said. My voice didn't sound like mine. It was flat. Empty. "Fix her, C in."
We're trying. But she has to want to come back," he whispered, looking at me with eyes full of pity. "And right now, Jay has every reason to stay where she is."
The Garrison in Ruins
I turned around and saw the "Army" I had built.
Aries was slumped against a vending machine, his face buried in his hands, his shoulders shaking with silent, heaving sobs. Percy was standing by the entrance, staring out at the rain, his face a mask of stone.
Section E was huddled in the corner of the waiting room. Mica was being held by Freya, both of them weeping into each other's shoulders. David, Denzel, and Blaster were sitting on the floor, their heads between their knees. The "savages" were gone. There was no chaos left. Only the weight of a loss so massive it had leveled the Black Box to the ground.
Kuya Angelo walked up to me. He didn't say anything. He didn't roast me. He didn't mock my "pedestrian" handling of the crisis. He just put a hand on my shoulder, and for the first time, I felt him tremble.
The Silent Vow
I walked over to the glass partition of Jay's room. I pressed my palm against it.
"Jay," I whispered, the word fogging the glass. "You can't do this. I know she's gone. I know it's dark. But if you leave, there is nothing left. I am nothing without you."
I looked down at my shirt. The front was soaked with the blood that had come from Aurora's nose in the car. It was drying, turning a dark, rusty brown. It was the only physical thing I had left of her.
The monitor inside Jay's room let out a long, flat tone.
"She's flatlining again!" a nurse screamed.
"Charge to 200! Go!"
I watched the "Starlight" of my life flicker on that table. The reality hit me then, sharper than any blade: I was the King of an empty house. My daughter was in a morgue drawer, and my wife was halfway through the door to join her.
"I'm not leaving you," I growled, my forehead hitting the glass. "Even if I have to drag you back from the grave myself, Jay. You are not leaving me alone in this."
......
The sky over the Mariano ancestral estate was the color of a fresh bruise, heavy with a drizzle that felt like the world was refusing to wash away the pain.
It was the day we did the unthinkable. The day we laid a small, white casket into the earth while the mother of that child lay three cities away, tethered to a ventilator and a fading hope.
I stood at the edge of the grave, my hand gripping the handle of an umbrella I didn't even realize was open. I felt like a man split in half. My body was here, in the cold mud, watching Aurora be lowered into the ground. But my soul—my entire consciousness—was in the ICU of the Medical Center, hovering over Jay.
Aries and Percy stood on either side of me, their faces gaunt, their black suits soaked through. Kuya Angelo was behind us, his hand on my shoulder, his grip the only thing keeping me from falling into the hole myself.
"Dust to dust," the priest murmured.
The sound of the first handful of earth hitting the white wood was the loudest sound I've ever heard. It sounded like a gavel. Final.
Section E was lined up in a row, all of them in black. Mica was leaning on David, her eyes so swollen she could barely see. Felix stood with his camera bag at his feet, his hands empty. They weren't students today. They weren't a militia. They were just children who had seen the sun go out.
"We have to go back, Keifer," Lia whispered, her voice trembling. "The hospital called. Jay's blood pressure is dropping again."
I didn't move. I couldn't move. I looked at the small headstone—Aurora Watson-Mariano. Six months of life. A lifetime of grief.
"I can't leave her here alone," I choked out.
"She's not alone," Ate Ella said, stepping forward and placing a single white rose on the casket. "She has the stars. But Jay... Jay is alone in that dark room, Keifer. She's fighting for a reason to breathe, and you're the only reason she has left."
The drive back to the hospital was a blur of high-speed turns and silent agony. I didn't change my clothes. I walked into the ICU still smelling of damp earth and funeral incense, my shoes caked in the mud of my daughter's grave.
I pushed through the double doors, ignoring the nurses who tried to tell me I needed to sanitize.
"Status?" I barked at C in.
He was sitting by Jay's bed, his head in his hands. He looked up, and the pity in his eyes was almost more than I could bear.
"She's stable, but only because the machines are doing 90% of the work," C in said. "Her heart rhythm is still erratic. It's like her body knows the funeral happened. It's like she felt the earth move."
I walked to the side of the bed. Jay looked so small under the heavy medical blankets. Her head was still wrapped in a light bandage from her own lingering recovery, and the tubes in her mouth made her look like a captive rather than a patient.
I took her hand. It was thin, the skin translucent, the pulse under her thumb a flickering, desperate thing.
"I buried her, Jay," I whispered, my forehead leaning against the cold metal of the bedrail. "I put our girl in the ground today. And I am telling you right now—I am not doing it again. I am not burying you."
The monitor let out a jagged, warning chirp. Her heart rate was dipping. 45... 42... 40.
"She's slipping, Keifer!" Mica cried from the doorway, the rest of Section E huddled behind her.
"No, she isn't!" I roared, standing up and leaning over her. I didn't care who heard me. I didn't care about the decorum of the ICU. "Jay! You listen to me! Alexander is at home. He is six months old and he is looking for his twin, and if you leave him, he will have nothing! I will have nothing!"
I pressed my hand over her heart, feeling the weak, staccato thud of a muscle that had been shattered by grief.
"Don't you dare leave me with an empty house," I sobbed into the crook of her neck. "Fight. For the one we have left. Fight, weify."
The ICU erupted into motion as the alarms went full-scale. C in lunged for the crash cart, but I didn't move. I stayed pinned to her side, my hand over her heart, trying to force my own strength into her through the skin.
Outside, the storm had finally stopped, leaving a terrifying, cold silence. Inside, the only sound was the mechanical rhythm of the ventilator, and the desperate, silent prayer of a King who had lost his princess and was now fighting to keep his Queen