When she was younger, it was her being given an award as a student at Salem because at that point it was the happiest moment of her youth.
As an adult, it is the moment she first laid eyes on the boy who would become her son.
The love of her life to join her and her adoptive son’s life and be the man she thought he could be for her a decade+ ago.
The love of her life bleeding out/her son being killed
The patronus is because she has a complex and complicated history. She is both happy and sad, she loves herself but struggles to think she deserves good things, she is angry and yet has forgiven mistakes. The biggest is that she is resilient and has survived many tragic and hard to cope with situations in her years as a law enforcer and now Chief.
MOE is because her son brings her life so much joy but she wants him to have a stable and secure father figure to attach to. She has had some relationships but she is looking for the end game, the final one, the endgame. She wants a family. She deserves the man she loves.
Her son is everything and her love has been there for so long, her partner originally many years before, and without them, her life would be empty. Her greatest fear is to lose her loved ones because they make her world worth it. They are all she has left.
History
Reylyn has a complicated past.
Her father was never around and her mother blamed her for it because well, he never wanted kids, he wanted fun. Her mother was bitter and treated her poorly all through her youth. She received a formal education at Salem and relished in the time away but struggled too because her mother was drowning her sorrows in whatever vice she could find. Her mother was seldom employed and ended up dying on the streets from a magic scuffle over debts owed. She was about 16 at the time her mother died. During school she worked hard, made a few friends, but didn’t keep in touch with them because it was just fleeting friendships that weren’t all that important to her. She only had one boyfriend during school years and they have kept in touch via letters on occasion, just updates on life.
As soon as she could, she went to a college and ended up hooking up with a man much too old for her being a barely-legal adult while he was in his late-twenties. Several life turns later, the relationship ended and she went to the police academy. Despite having magic, it was never a key part of her life and she often defaulted to more nomag behaviors. She worked hard and learned everything she could both traditionally and magically and she signed on as a cop. Later, she ascended ranks, made detective, sergeant, lieutenant, captain…chief.
She was partners with a man for a good chunk of those years. She and him were best friends and could count on each other. Until she couldn’t. Following the mysterious death of his wife and youngest son, he disappeared without word for more than a decade. Resurfacing briefly with tales of living abroad and trying to rebuild his life and find out the reason his wife and son were killed. His older children became completely estranged from him and since his return in the last year, he has been rebuilding relationships with everyone, including her.
During the time that he was gone, he missed a lot of big things. She was kidnapped and held hostage on several occasions, watched several law enforcement of the nomag and magical kinds die at their own hands, and witnessed horrors that only an officer could understand when they walk into it. She has trauma she is still working through from the experiences. She keeps those closed up tightly. She has been in therapy since a few months after her partner left and continues to see the same therapist.
She had some other friendships on the job that have kept her life in balance, but recently a friend took a teaching job and another has taken to mentoring, leaving her in a bind with what to do and a imbalance of work-life-family.
Reylyn isn’t sure what to make of the changes and she is reluctant to accept him back into her life because of his disappearance previously, she doesn’t want to experience the same emotions all over again. Especially not with a son in tow.
Her son came into her life in the last nine years as a baby that was abandoned during a bad magical child trafficking case. She fought to get custody of him because they didn’t want to turn him over to someone who spent as much time away as she did, but finally they relented and they let her first foster him and then finally adopt him.
