Work Text:
I. head
Maya is used to stepping back; it's almost a reflex now. Riley is over Lucas, Riley has moved on to brighter boys: large hands, dark hair, less than perfect smiles. They practically trip over themselves in their effort to be the first one in line, the first one to carry her books or walk her to class or – and she says she'd laugh if she saw it happen, but she doesn't know anymore – bring her a white horse.
She isn't stringing them along, Maya knows, she just wants everyone to have their shot. It's a new boy every month, every week; they all go on exactly one date and then Riley tries her best to look apologetic when she lets them go. It's unsurprising, considering her initial lack of interest, but at least she never keeps them around quite as long as she did with Charlie.
“How will I know if he's the One if I don't give him a chance?” Riley protests when Maya brings it up, dejectedly swirling her smoothie around with her purple straw. “I'm not going to say no because I'm looking for something specific and miss out on meeting the love of my life.”
Maybe you've already met them, Maya thinks, and it's middle school all over again, right down to keeping secrets from her best friend and bottling up her feelings. Maybe you're looking at all the wrong people.
“Honey, you're allowed to say no,” she points out, ignoring the way the words stab at her chest, each one individual, heart-wrenching. “You get to write your own story.”
Sometimes Riley and her perpetual dates make her feel like a third wheel because they can't be the two of them when there are extra people – extra boys – lurking, grabbing for her hands, taking the space on her shoulder that belongs to Maya alone. Most of the time, those boys fill her with a rage, an all-consuming jealousy that snaps at her ribcage and hungers for her heart, and just as quickly gives way to an emptiness, a loneliness that weighs her small frame down.
Days like those are all too often are when she calls Lucas. He comes in through her window with less ease and more uncertainty than the way she slips through Riley's, but she pretends it's because of his much bigger body and leaves it at that. He brings her little gifts he knows she'll like and holds her in his arms, and it's nice to have someone's full attention. She knows he wants more and if she thinks about it hard enough, Maya can convince herself that she wants that, too.
They work on paper; they work really well when everything is governed by rules and thoughts and brains wired to only love the male specimen. And Maya knows that's not her, that that will never be enough, but it feels like she's losing Riley and she can't lose Lucas, too, because he gets the broken pieces of her in ways Riley will never understand, so she lies.
By omission, but she lies. It only takes forty-seven non-consecutive nights of texting him – she doesn't want to ever hear the eagerness in his voice – and asking him to stay before she works up the nerve. She tells Lucas she loves him, and the sun's shining and she's finger painted all over his face because he's a beautiful canvas and the words are so fucking quiet and breathy and absolutely nothing like her, but he doesn't notice because he's kissing her now, everywhere, and the paint hasn't dried and all she can think is that her masterpiece is ruined.
Why the fuck did she use purple paint?
II. heart
Riley is used to happy couples; she's grown up with Cory and Topanga and there is nothing she can recognize faster than pure, unadulterated bliss. And she isn't dumb, either, not the way everyone paints her to be, so she doesn't understand why they aren't like that. It's Maya and Lucas, she's been sure of them since the eighth grade, and they're not working.
They pretend to be; Riley can see that Maya's trying and Lucas is trying harder, but it doesn't make sense. They're supposed to be fire, they're supposed to be so in tandem that they don't have to speak to just know what's going on with the other, they're supposed to be the kind of senior couple that intimidates the rest of the school, makes them envious of what they have.
To be fair, there isn't a lot to compare to in terms of their behavior. Riley's come to terms with the fact that everything about her and Lucas was forced, strong platonic feelings they'd tried to twist into something else. And Maya, well, Maya has never really been the dating type; her thing for Josh had never gone anywhere, and she'd left Lucas alone – until now, of course – long after Riley stopped trying to push them together.
Maya's talking to Farkle, telling him the kind of story that involves sweeping hand gestures and voices that rise and fall dramatically, and Riley's heard it before so she simply watches the two of them – the observer of humanity – and occasionally catches Maya's eye when the blonde looks her way, smirking as she leaves out a little detail that will become an inside joke for just the two of them.
Lucas joins them, late because baseball practice always runs long, and he sits next to Maya, tries to drape his arm around her, and she leans her body away. It's casual, almost instinctive on her part to evade his touch, and she never stops her dialogue as she does it. Riley glances at Lucas, sees him take only a moment to mask his hurt expression, and that's it. The two of them don't talk – not about that or anything else – except when Maya asks him cordially to pass the saltshaker.
Nothing about that moment is loud or telling, really, but it sticks in Riley's mind. She plays it on repeat as she watches them in history class; Lucas keeps his eyes trained on the back of Maya's head, as he's always done, but she never turns his way, never casually places her elbow on his desk to make sure she captures his attention.
This is it, she realizes suddenly. Two months in and it's already the beginning of the end. It makes her reconsider a lot of things: why they seemed so perfect for each other in middle school and even more so in Texas, why neither of them – the only two people in the world she could ever think of being with Lucas – could keep a relationship with him.
She feels like a terrible best friend for not being all that sad about it, but Maya and Lucas as a couple rarely spent time with Riley. It makes sense, of course, that they wouldn't want someone else – especially not Lucas' sort-of ex – hanging around on their dates, but it doesn't mean she missed them any less.
And when it does happen, and Maya is willing to cry and talk about it and call him a good for nothing cowboy or something a little stronger but still along those lines, Riley will be there with open arms, ready to hold her and smooth back her golden hair. She loves Lucas so much, she really does, but even he isn't quite good enough for her peaches.
III. sense
Maya breaks up with Lucas and comes out on the same day – 'all or nothing,' Riley thinks, which is exactly the kind of girl she is – and she's bisexual, just another thing for Riley to add to the endless list of facts she knows about Maya Hart.
“So why not Lucas?” Riley asks over mac and cheese in her tiny kitchen, grasping hopelessly for the ketchup bottle Maya deliberately holds out of her reach. “I mean, you like girls, but you also like boys.”
“Yes,” Maya answers with her nose scrunched up, like the thought of boys sickens her right now. “That's what bi means, honey. But I don't … maybe we had something in the past, me and Lucas, but it's not there anymore.”
“No spark,” Riley clarifies. “No passion.” She giggles a little bit over the last word, practically falling into Maya's lap as she leans over for the ketchup, but the blonde only nods her head. “I'm sorry about you and Lucas, Maya.”
“Don't be,” she replies fervently, then bites down hard on her lip. “I shouldn't have started anything with him in the first place. I didn't go into it thinking that I was using him, I really thought that if we started something, I could fall in love with him. But it was to just try and get over someone else and – well, that's using someone, isn't it?”
Fleetingly, Riley considers checking up on Lucas soon, just to make sure he's okay, then dismisses it. Maya needs her right now, and Farkle will be so much better at whatever Lucas needs for support, anyway. “At least you ended it pretty early,” she tries, offering up the most optimistic outlook that she can because she can't say that her best friend's actions were okay.
There's a lull in the conversation now, because Maya knows that, too, and finally Riley asks quietly, “Was it because of a girl?” She isn't sure what answer she's expecting, let alone what answer she wants, but she's glad that Maya puts her fork down and doesn't answer right away.
When she says “yes” in what Riley, as a writer, can only describe as a wistful sigh, she somehow can't think of a more accurate word for what she's feeling than relief.
Time goes by, as it's wont to do, and it feels easier than ever before to be Riley and Maya again. They fall back into a rhythm of ring power, wrapping themselves up in each other's arms, always knowing what the other is about to say. And it's at the bay window – where else could it possibly be – where Riley starts to reconsider some things about herself.
Maya's head is in her lap, and Riley absentmindedly strokes at the waterfall of hair spilling all over her dress. “How do you know,” she starts softly, and the brave part of her wants to look at Maya as she asks this and the other part, the one that overthinks, refuses to let her. “How do you know the difference between when you love a girl and when you're in love with a girl?”
Their bodies are so close together that she can feel the exact moment when Maya freezes up. She's never doubted her best friend's intelligence for a second, no matter what the blonde thought of herself in middle school; she's sure that Maya will understand what she means. Riley doesn't know how to play it anything but safe, and maybe she's reading the signs all wrong – she thought she and Lucas were destined for each other and everyone got hurt – anyway.
“Well,” Maya says, looking very much like she's trying and failing to find the right words. She sits up, shakes out her hair, drums her fingers on her knee with far too much intensity. “I guess it's when you start thinking that you want to kiss her.”
“Oh,” Riley responds, her mouth dry. It's straightforward, it makes sense, it's all so very Maya. And she has her lips pursed, waiting for Maya to lean in and just plant one on her, which, she assumes, is exactly how Maya goes about kissing people, but nothing happens. It's just the two of them sitting at the bay window, platonic as always, because she's forgotten that Maya Hart doesn't lean in, she only steps back.
She licks her lips, shakes her leg ever so slightly, hoping Maya can't feel the vibration and figure out that she's nervous. If anything between them is ever going to happen – and she can feel it in her bones, in the stardust that makes up her skin, this girl who believes in fate and soulmates and “until death do us part,” that something is supposed to happen – Riley will have to initiate it.
“Fuck it,” she mumbles, mostly to herself but Maya turns her head to hear the words, and Riley cups her face in her trembling hands and leans in. Graduation is fast approaching, and for once Riley feels like there's nothing to panic about.
IV. sensibility
Lucas calls them the most insufferable couple to be around, which is saying a lot considering how uncomfortable he was around Smackle while she and Farkle were together, and Maya takes the affection in his voice as a sign that the two of them are on their way back to normalcy. It's good, she thinks, that they can all finally fall back into the groove of the five of them – Zay, surprisingly, was always relatively drama-free – and it's her and Riley who share strawberry banana smoothies at Topanga's now.
It's the two of them who hold hands on the way home, not because they should but because Maya always has to be touching her somehow, just to make sure her beautiful sunshine girl is real. It's the two of them at the movies; it's Maya's shoulder she leans on when she's scared, Maya's wrist that she traces circles on with her thumb. It's Maya who makes Riley feel like a princess, who asks her to prom with roses and balloons and Yogi on skates, and the brunette doesn't hesitate this time because it's Maya Hart, the girl she loves.
She crawls into Riley's bay window the night before graduation, and it's really the morning of graduation, but Riley is awake and awaiting, her arms folded primly. On the floor is the Rileytown flag and the kind of paint samples people attempting a home renovation would pick up at hardware stores, complete with watercolor paintbrushes.
“We can't use those,” she laughs, and Riley shrugs as if to say well, that's all I have, so Maya dumps the contents of her bag on the floor: proper watercolors, charcoal, her sketchbook, colored pencils, scrap paper.
“I don't know anything about this,” Riley says nervously as Maya sets up the different colors in a neat little line. “I don't think I even want to revamp the flag, Maya, it's too sentimental.”
They're both quiet for a second, then look at each other to say in unison: “New flag!”
Maya kisses her quickly, because they're close enough and she can and she wants to, and then it's all business from there. They plan out the flag in Maya's sketchbook, scavenge through the Matthews' apartment as quietly as they can for the right size fabric, and then Riley writes down the words in her loopy handwriting while Maya decorates the rest.
Cory finds the two of them tangled up together on the floor several hours later, their paint-stained hands clinging tightly to each other, a drying banner of two interlocking rings, among other things, beside them that reads: RILAYAVILLE. He's not even mad until he remembers Maya is more than his daughter's best friend and that they're graduating in two hours.
Hart and Matthews are nowhere near each other in alphabetical order, but they find their way towards each other on stage anyway, yawning as they proudly hold their diplomas up to the world. Riley is the one who kisses Maya impulsively, and it's the kind that makes newly-turned adults believe in true love and fairy tales again, where her toes curl up and she can feel Maya smiling against her mouth. She hasn't just met the world; in this moment, she's conquered it.