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Maya Fey is not afraid of death.
At least, not in the traditional sense. That’s what happens when your world is centered around it. From dawn to dusk, she communes with the dead, and she can’t fear them; not only would that give them too much power, but mostly, she’s just met so many of them that she knows better. More than anything else, they’re sad. Part of her job is to give them peace, and then they can move on. As long as she’ll have someone to do that for her, then it doesn’t seem so final.
So no, she’s not afraid of the traditional Death-with-a-capital-D that haunts most people’s dreams like the Grim Reaper. That idea actually kind of makes her laugh. Because the death that Maya does fear? Would that it were so easily defined.
It lurks in corners, she’s found, like cobwebs. The less she checks up on it, the more it grows, and her life shamefully moves on without it, until she sticks her foot in the wrong place and is reminded of its existence all at once, wrapping around her, the ghosts surrounding her. And then it’s like they’re choking her. Her mom. Dr. Grey. People from cases she worked with Nick, victims and murderers alike.
Mia. Always Mia. Still warm to the touch. Slipping out of her mind, only ever leaving the barest trace behind. Floating in the sides of her vision nearly constantly during those three years, then disappearing, but never really leaving Maya’s thoughts. She comes up the most; she lingers the longest.
It’s no surprise that the sticky, clinging feeling of those memories surrounds Maya when she wakes up on her birthday, because this year, she’s 27. She’s officially outlived Mia. Every breath she draws from here on out will be one her sister didn’t get.
Inside her head, she can hear a logical voice that sounds kinda like Edgeworth arguing that Mia didn’t die on her own 27th birthday, so these kinds of calculations are pointless. Besides, she isn’t taking life from her sister by living her own. Maya steadfastly ignores this, because even if she isn’t taking anything from Mia, she’s not giving anything to her, either.
Maya had wanted to grow up to make a difference, to honor not just her family’s name, but her sister’s. Instead she’s grown, sheltered and straining at the bonds, right into the path put in front of her. Part of that was Mia’s doing, but Maya can’t help but wonder sometimes–even though Mia left the Kurain school behind and stopped the choice between the two of them from being a choice at all–if she’d wanted more from Maya than that. If she, bursting out towards the world, would find it in herself to be proud of Maya, still in Kurain Village like a flower rooted deep, spending her time looking over her shoulder and speaking more in the voices of the dead than her own.
Unsurprisingly, Nick thinks she’s being ridiculous.
He gives her a happy-birthday call around 3:30, when Trucy gets home from school, at which point Maya’s been up for about nine hours (filled with a flurry of activity so she hasn’t had time to dwell), but she knows he only rolled out of bed in time to meet the bus. They sing to her through the tinny speaker, and even though she just saw them not two weeks ago, it makes her chest ache to hear it. That loneliness again, like she can feel how big the world is around her. How empty, in the moment, of people she loves.
Once Trucy’s been dispatched to work on her homework, they can actually talk, and that’s when Maya brings it up, feeling strange and nervous, talking around it but not actually through it. And Nick gets it immediately, and tries to be nice about it, patient, even, but he’s got so much on his plate that some slight disbelief creeps through.
“Oh, Maya, c’mon. You know Mia loved you.”
His reaction is what she expected, even if it does give her a flinch of guilt. Because isn’t it an insult to Mia’s memory, anyway, to picture her as anything other than perfect? It’s been so long that she’s hardened, somehow, in Maya’s mind, like wood turned to rock by pressure and time, and there isn’t enough room within the rigidity to fit all the different impressions Maya used to have of her.
“I know that she loved me,” Maya agrees. Her voice sounds small. Seventeen again. “But that’s not the same as being proud of me.”
He exhales on the other end of the line, turning into inhuman, crackly static by the time it reaches her. His pauses are so long, these days. She used to talk with him so fast that they overlapped, like they were little kids hitting each other with their words. “Maya… what can I tell you that you don’t already know? You knew her a lot better than I did. And…” There’s another sigh, and a rough sound, a palm scraping over stubble like he’s rubbing the bottom of his face. “Speaking for the dead is your job, not mine.”
“But Nick,” Maya says, not like a petulant child, more desperate than she’d care to admit—just how much did she have riding on this phone call without realizing it? “You worked with her, you spent way more time with her after– after–”
It’s been almost ten years, but today Maya can’t make those words come. She can’t lump Mia in with all those untouchable spirits. She still wants, so badly, to believe that she’s something more.
“It’s different,” she tries to explain, because he’s been quiet, letting her find the words. “I know she was proud of you .” Like what, like her opinion could travel by proxy? Maya thinks, but presses her mouth together.
Nick might as well be Maya’s brother by now, and he’s probably the most well-equipped outside of the Fey clan to understand how she feels, but as much as she loves him for it, there’s something in the blood here. He can see it from the outside, and he’s had it touch his life, but he was only ever partially connected, a hand reaching into the tangled mess, drawn in and chewed up and spit back out, bleeding but whole.
For her, though, the ties that bind her are her veins, and cutting them out is unthinkable — for the pain it would cause and the loss of connection both. It’s never more apparent than when it comes to Mia. Maya is one of her only two links to the world of the living. She holds Mia’s memory, her living legacy or what’s left of it, in her palms, but at the same time, it drains her, tires her, leaves her wanting to languish in those cobwebbed corners the more she thinks about it. She remembers what she heard about a pair of conjoined twins, that when one died, the other did, too, hours later, his systems unable to keep up with the demand of supporting not just one but two bodies.
That’s a horrible way to think about Mia, Maya knows, and she feels guilty every time it crosses her mind, less and less sensical as the years go on. She hasn’t been required to summon Mia, specifically, in years. But Mia is both cause and effect at once, representative of so much else in Maya’s life. Starting down this path opens so many doors.
That, more than anything else, is what gives Maya the idea to talk to Pearly.
It’s not uncommon for Maya to go find Pearl while Pearl’s doing something else–working on her homework, training, reading a book. It reminds them of days in Nick’s office, either cleaning or ‘helping’ him somehow, and the comfortable silence that doesn’t have to be centered around channeling is a welcome reprieve for them both. When she slips in through the slightly-open sliding door of Pearl’s room, Maya receives a faint smile in return from the girl at her desk. It’s only when she doesn’t take a seat on Pearl’s blow-up couch or even sprawl across her bed that Pearl raises her head, concern knitting her features together. “Mystic Maya?”
“Pearly,” she starts, shifting her weight from foot to foot, “how would you feel if I made you Master of the Kurain School?”
Pearl doesn’t flinch, just sets her novel in an upside-down V on her desk, and blinks owlishly at Maya. “Um… do I have to decide right now?”
May the Mother bless her for not reacting worse. She kicks herself for asking such a loaded question, then sighs. “No, Pearly, it’s just a hypothetical.” Seeing Pearl mouth the word, Maya quickly adds, “I mean, I’m just saying, like, what if that happened.”
Pearl’s hand flies to her mouth. God, she’s so grown-up now, but she still looks eight when she does that, and Maya wants to gather her close. “I… d-don’t know,” she admits, and the stutter that comes out is another callback to her deeper childhood, when she knew the pain Maya’s referencing without fully understanding it.
There’s a beat of silence in the room that would have been peaceful if Maya hadn’t brought her beating, messy heart in and slapped it down for Pearl to see. To force Pearl to see.
Then in a rush, they’re both speaking. “I don’t even know why I’m asking you–” Maya starts, feeling like the worst big sister ever for asking; the mean little whisper of the fact that Mia didn’t even ask washes over her a second later, guilty and freezing.
“Mystic Maya, if you needed m–” Pearl begins simultaneously, a determined expression that still makes her look too old covering her face. Then it drops; her head tilts to the side. She knows Maya too well to let something like this slide.
“Are you… o-okay?”
Maya doesn’t have an answer, but she can’t tell Pearl that. Not when she’s already bothered her way more than she deserves.
“‘Course I am.” She smiles, and by now, it’s an easy thing to push over her lips. She can even crinkle her nose, her eyes at the corners, make it all look real.
It’s also an easy thing for Pearly to see through it. She’s been trying to break the habit of biting her nails lately, so she chews on her lip instead, but the hesitation is still there.
Maya knows the feeling well. She’s been Pearl in this situation, with an older sister who wouldn’t tell her everything and questions Maya didn’t know how to answer without her. It’s not lost on her, though, today of all days, that she and Pearl are now the same age that Mia and Maya had been ten years ago. It’s all just one big cycle, it feels like, everything returning to the same place, this same old hurt seeded again every year.
She knows now that she can’t keep avoiding this forever, beating around the bush instead of going straight to the root. In a way, she’s lucky, because most people can’t confront this kind of question as directly as she can.
Maya shamefully wishes she had an excuse not to.
After a dinner that she barely picks at, she slips off alone to the Channeling Chamber. The candles light easily. The mat rustles under her bare feet. Usually this process is meditative, but the nervous energy coursing through her makes it impossible to sink into things like she usually does. There is no one else to focus on, no grieving family to soothe. There’s only Maya. Maya and the Mia-shaped hole in this room, in her life, and the second she acknowledges it for real, it’s like a fucking bullet wound.
Instead of bleeding out, she puts pen to paper, a purple gel pen she thinks she stole from Mia’s office in the first place. It’s the only way she has to talk to Mia, and in the spirit of teenaged conversations, late-night phone calls, Maya tries not to overthink it. After all, the Mia she misses–the Mia she so desperately needs right now–isn’t Mia Fey, defense lawyer and murder victim, or Mia Fey, prodigal daughter of the Fey clan. She just–she needs her big sister, and that’s what motivates her shaky hand. Tears blotch the ink, but not enough to render it unreadable.
As soon as she’s done, Maya doesn’t give herself a chance to even breathe. She closes her eyes and shifts into a kneel, then reaches inside. Opens the door, like the lessons say. It’s a relief, after the day she’s had. She wants to be someone other than herself. And if that means sinking into cobwebs, then so be it.
It hasn’t been seven years since she last found Mia in these dark corners, but it’s been long enough. It’s almost unfamiliar, and then, all in a rush, it’s a feeling Maya knows, a strange proclivity, like breathing underwater. Like–
She can’t finish the thought.
There are no clocks in the Channeling Chamber, nothing to indicate the passage of time. People take as long as they need. As she swims out from Mia, the only reason Maya knows it’s taken any time at all is because some of the candles have a few more drips of wax on their sides. There’s a warmth to this that makes Maya want to stay under just a little bit longer, like the real world is a winter morning.
But Mia is leaving, again, her spirit retreating as gently as ever, with what seems like the ghost of fingertips across Maya’s cheek. For a few seconds Maya wants to do the opposite of what she should, wants to cry and wail and dive back in, but then– but then she sees the letter, turned over and filled with handwriting she could never forget, and any desire to linger in a world she doesn’t belong to evaporates. She rolls onto her side and reaches for it with fingers that ache from writing she doesn’t remember.
Maya, the first line reads. Even her name in Mia’s hand makes Maya grip the paper almost hard enough to tear it. She keeps reading.
I am so proud of you.
It’s a relief she can’t believe. The dried tear tracks on her cheeks go sticky again when she starts crying, but this time it feels so good, hollowing her out of all that unfounded worry.
Ten years without Mia, ten years she never got, but Maya knows now that she hasn’t been wasting it. She isn’t living on borrowed time; she’s living on her own. It’s a strange realization, but welcome, invigorating. Exactly the kind of thing her big sister wanted for her, no matter where in the world she ended up.
She curls up, arms wrapped around herself. Even though they’re her own, she feels an echo of warmth.
Exactly what she needed.