Chapter Text
You can’t spell “Maya” and “spontaneous” without using at least one letter that’s the same between the two, so when they’re driving around the curve of a nameless mountain and can see the sea on the other side of the steel railing, just over the cliff, and Maya throws out her hand with a sharp gasp, telling Franziska to pull over, Franziska is as much surprised as she isn’t. Does Maya do this on purpose? She’s about to have a heart-attack—one she’ll chew Maya out over scaring her so needlessly for later. She had thought there was something she somehow missed and she was about to crash them both —
—but then Maya clicks open the passenger side door, cutting the music off, and her sandals hit the asphalt and when Franziska watches her round the hood of their rental to stare out over the ocean, she forgets anything she was going to say at all.
The sunset is gorgeous. Reds and violet like melted crayons pooling together, waxy and textured by the thin ripple of clouds.
And there, under the acrylic hues, with her hair loose and swinging in the wind, is Maya Fey. She looks like something out of a postcard— Greetings from the West Coast— or a painting by one of those fools who used to live near lighthouses. And when Maya turns to glance at her over her shoulder, grinning from ear to ear, Franziska’s heart gives a horrible twist and sigh.
She loves her.
She loves her.
And to think: there have been so many instances in both of their lives, where they very nearly would never have been able to have this at all.
Franziska turns off the engine and steps out.
“I can’t help thinking,” Maya hums and turns back around once Franziska has reached her side. “Maybe I want to be happy. Maybe I want to. And what’s so wrong with that?”
“I’m afraid I must have missed something. I’m very unsure as to how your being happy could be wrong in the first place.”
Maya smiles to herself and ducks her chin to her collar. She clasps her hands together behind her back. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t deserve to. Not when so many people I know are—” Her voice tilts oddly, cuts off right at a lurch in her pitch. Maya swallows. Franziska’s hands itch to hold her. “Well. You know, I’ve never done anything like this before, so this is kind of exciting! This road trip we’re doing. Aunt Morgan was kind of a stickler about the things we could and couldn’t do after Mom left, y’know. She was worse on Pearly, of course. Pearly could never go anywhere. Ha! That really sucked for her.”
And the miracle of it all: that somehow, even after everything, Maya laughs. Though it doesn’t sound happy.
Franziska reaches out.
Very gently, her fingers curl over Maya’s. Maya unclasps her hands and grabs hold of Franziska’s like it’s a lifeline. Like she’s drowning and Franziska is her ring in the water. That single, saving light holding out on the coast.
Does she know it’s the same in reverse?
“I may not know where this is coming from,” Franziska murmurs. She thinks she’s forgotten that the sun is supposed to be beautiful as it’s setting; all she can see, all she wants to see, is Maya. “Or what brought this up, but I do know that if anyone deserves to be happy after all they have gone through, it is you, Maya Fey.”
Maya blinks up at her. Her mouth crooks at the corner, all wobbly and shaky. “Aw, gee. Thanks. Y-you too, Franzi.”
Very slowly, Franziska smiles. She reaches up a hand to Maya’s cheek. The motion is new—one Franziska herself is not used to—touch is something von Karma’s do not have in abundance because it is proof of sentiment and sentiment is weakness and von Karma’s do not have weaknesses—
—but she curls her fingers against Maya’s cheek and brushes a long strand of her hair behind her ear.
“I think even those who have loved you but are no longer here would agree that at the very least, you can and should be permitted to free yourself from whatever horrible voice it is in your head that tells you you do not deserve joy.”
Which is, perhaps, precisely when Maya’s face crumbles. For one moment, one second, her eyebrows pinch and squeeze and then in the next, she buries her face into Franziska’s chest. Her arms are twin snakes, squeezing tight around her middle.
Slowly, gently, Franziska wraps her arms around Maya in turn. She runs a hand through Maya’s hair, and says nothing about the tiny, wet, muffled of Thank you, and I love you, that Maya mumbles into her shirt, and nothing about how they probably need to get back on the road if they want to make it to their next hotel stop before it gets too late.
She lets them simply be as the sky melts from red to deep, twinkling navy.