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Maya Fey is strong.
She’s always been strong. Sure, she’s not always the best with her emotions, and sure, sometimes she can be pretty childish, but for the amount of shit she’s been through, she handles everything pretty well.
Maya Fey is not the type of person to break into tears over a torn-open envelope on her boyfriend’s desk, her boyfriend who’s office she’s only in because she wanted to surprise him when he came back from lunch. But her head is in her hands now, and she keeps looking at the stupid ripped envelope and the only thing she can think of is her sister.
Mia taught her, when she was seven years old, how to open an envelope properly. Maya had gotten a birthday card, and when she went to grab the corner to rip the rose-pink envelope it came in across the top, Mia grabbed her hand and stopped her. “You’re doing it wrong,” Mia told her, and Maya can still hear that in her head, in that half-girlish voice Mia held onto even late into her teenage years. “Here, like this.”
Gently, Mia opened the envelope from the bottom of the flap, explaining as her hands tugged at the fragile paper, “This is the respectful way to do it. When you seal an envelope, you’re putting part of you in it — you know, how you lick it to seal it — so you have to open it carefully to show respect to the person inside.”
Maya mostly listened to that when she was young, but as she grew into her pre-teen years, she disregarded the idea, favoring simplicity over superstition. After Mia’s death, she never tore an envelope again.
She’s slumped against Simon’s desk, face soaked with tears when the door opens. Simon stares at her in surprise and confusion for a moment before stepping close to her, resting an apprehensive hand on her back. “Maya? What’s wrong?”
“You—” Maya chokes on a sob— “you opened your envelope wrong.”
“...Okay.” Simon is silent for a few moments, his fingertips tracing shapes on Maya’s upper back. “Do you need a hug?”
Maya stands so fast she almost faints, throwing her arms around his sides and pressing the side of her head to his chest. Simon hugs her back tight, hands firm on her sides. It’s quiet for a while, all little sniffles and slowly steadying breaths and the dull hum of the air conditioning, and mostly Maya listens to Simon’s heartbeat.
“I miss Mia,” Maya mumbles, eyes squeezed shut. Quietly, she laughs at herself. “God, I’m sorry, Si. I was trying to surprise you and I— I saw your stupid envelope and I just couldn’t—”
“Love.”
Maya tilts her head up to look at him, staring at his focused eyes as he brings a hand up to wipe her tears with his thumb. “Huh?”
“It’s okay.” He holds her face in both of his hands now, pressing an apprehensive kiss to her forehead and letting his lips linger there when she sighs. “You’ll be okay.”
“I know,” Maya admits, slowly breaking the hug to rest her hands over Simon’s. “But I feel like I shouldn’t. I have all this fun and so many friends and you and I… Mia’s the one who should… it should’ve been me.”
“No.” Simon’s voice isn’t mean, but it’s firm, certain. “It shouldn’t have been either of you, but it was her. And she would’ve wanted you to be happy.”
Maya nods. She knows, logically, that he’s right, but god, she doesn’t know how to accept it. She doesn’t know if she wants to. Because giving up the grief, giving up the pain — it feels like letting go of Mia. Like betraying her. It feels wrong.
“It’s weird,” Maya says quietly. “People always talk about the stages of grief like they’re some linear thing but they’re not. I feel all of them at once, sometimes, and then sometimes I don’t know what I’m feeling. People expect me to be over it and I don’t know how to do that and I don’t know if I’m really supposed to.”
“I know,” Simon replies, letting his hands fall to her shoulders. “I understand.”
Maya chuckles to herself, at herself, maybe, looking down at her feet. “You do, don’t you?” She pauses, then, and looks back up at him. “Do really stupid things ever set you off?”
Simon grins at her, tugging her to walk with him as he moves to sit in his chair. She stands in front of him, leaning against his messy desk as he says, “I was getting groceries the other day, and this little girl in the self-checkout line grabbed a chocolate bar and held it up to her dad, asking to get it, I guess, and the way she held it… it felt exactly how Metis would show Aura her new inventions.” He purses his lips before asking, “Do you want to talk about the envelope thing?”
“You did open it wrong. You’re not supposed to rip it.” Maya leans back to grab the envelope, running her fingers across the torn edge. “Mia taught me that when I was a kid. You’re supposed to open them from the flap-triangle-thing.”
“Why is that?”
“It shows respect to the person who sent it. Because, um, you put your DNA in the envelope when you send it, so someone ripping it open is like they’re ripping a part of you.”
Simon nods. “I see.” He eyes the envelope before opening his desk drawer and slowly taking out an unopened envelope with Simon scribbled on the front in messy cursive. In the bottom-left corner reads Metis Cykes, and oh, Maya feels her heart drop. “Why don’t you show me how?”
“Okay,” Maya says softly, blinking at the envelope a few times before looking up at Simon. “Okay. Yeah. I think I would like that.”
Maya isn’t over Mia’s death. But as her hands rest over Simon’s, carefully guiding him to pull open the envelope, she knows she can be strong despite that. She knows they both can.