title: what if we ruin it all?
a/n: thank you all for the amazing feedback, it's truly wonderful. and so i picked up my shit and this happened. i'm really unsatisfied with how the last chapter went.. reading over it feels really rushed, sentences kinda flowing everywhere. maybe i'll get round to rewriting. but here is the next chapter xDDD
yeeeah, so this is another kinda prologue, but it does finally get to maya in nyu xD
summary: It is only three years later when things start making sense. / Wherein Maya enters NYU, and Josh tries to find himself... or her, of all means. —josh/maya, and whatever's next.
new york, new york
Maya doesn't forget.
Not even once. It's all the way through three (yes, three) soul-destroying years she counts the days, the hours, everything in between... of course, Josh pops up every now and again, and it's every once in a while they decide to converse (each time amazing, of course, as Maya decides), and it's great. It's fine, fantastic: she is happy that she's aware of what's going on, even if it's something little of what she understands, in Josh's mind when he looks at her. Somewhat differently, she guesses... from the whole Ski Lodge incident, and even more so the moment "little" was not so Maya. So perhaps it's near to nothing Maya can comprehend (she's never been a good watcher), but there's something that lets her know, like a siren, a little boing in the back of her mind, whenever she's sat down with Joshua Matthews, simply enjoying watching New York, listening in for car horns, dreaming of a busy life...
Whenever she's with Josh, everything changes.
And yet it doesn't. He's her Uncle Boing. It's the same, what she feels (what she thinks he feels), and it's there, still, all of it. Fireplace or not, hand-holding (although recent studies state there's been a steady increase in such and such) or not... she knows that what wasn't "just a crush" is still not "just a crush", and there are some days when Maya wants to scream at him for making her feel like this, so powerless and wrenched with almost horrifying euphoria at just the thought of what Josh does to her, but whatever it is, Maya knows she'll never be able to. There are some days and somedays that Maya can't get past.
"Still playing the long game, right?" Maya wants to ask. But he's got her frozen in time.
"As ever," Maya longs Josh to reply with.
But if neither say anything, they stare out in front of him, sometimes with laced fingers, sometimes with shoulders to lean on, sometimes not together at all. Sometimes, some days, Maya stares into the open, and always, every day, she wants to know if he's staring out, too. Just for her.
But it's a long shot. She knows it. This long game they're playing... it's not only some days does Maya think he's forgetting. There is a point when Josh stops visiting.
Maya needn't worry, she really shouldn't, but she does.
How can she help it? While Lucas and Riley are all loves up, Farkle and Smackle aformentioned, Maya's singing lullabies, hoping on that one day this long game will end, and Maya'll finally let go of herself. She knows she loves him, she does, she does, and she knows he likes her, but then again she doesn't.
This is Joshua freaking Matthews she is talking about. And she is Maya Hart.
Josh forgets.
Not for the whole three years... a rather lengthy way, in all honesty, because although Josh has never been one to be patient, but because he's never played one of these so-called games before.
It's less than a year through when he positively despises it. It's not chess, nor ludo, it can't be won. And it changes all the damn time it drives Josh nuts... and if there's one thing he hates is being anything less than one hundred percent in the right. But this doesn't make him anything like that. It leaves him confused... and something he doesn't understand?
He does not get, not one bit, Maya Hart.
He used to, he really did. Josh could be telling the truth for everyone, and really, he would be. In all his observations, he'd guessed (somewhat) right, Maya's tenderness, everyone coming before her because really that's all she'd ever learnt from herself. Josh had tried to steer her away from that, and perhaps it worked, but it made him steer away from the whole... wedge between them.
The borderline, the blockage—three years is slowly losing its value, and Josh doesn't know what he's supposed to do.
How long are long games exactly?
A year in, and Josh has no clue.
Nothing at all.
What is something he does know, is that he ends up visiting his family a lot, Cory's in particular, and for Riley and Auggie primarily, he needs to assure himself every time. College is not at all cracked up to be, and Josh had learnt that the hard way—no way in hell would he refer it as the Hogwarts to his soul, because that first year at NYU was... utter... hell. Staying at Cory's is the best solution he has ever possibly thought of.
A lot of that time, though he's done his best to avoid, is talking to Maya. Innocent chatter is all it has been, the occasional (and he repeats: occasional) hand-holding, and not once, in all that time, one whole year, at least fifty different conversations, fifty different ways, has Maya questioned this long game of theirs.
It was like... it was like it had been everything one second, and nothing the next.
Another year goes by, and the college grows on him. Studies become a routine, this routine becomes his lifestyle, and he gets sucked into the vacancy. Maya, he sees less and less, and as soon as he can even call it on that he's done, another year comes. And this year...
He thinks. He doesn't watch anymore (except for when he sometimes, some days, stares out at New York, wistfully, gazing at the other side, hoping—), he just doesn't. He thinks.
And somewhere along the line, he forgets.
It seems so impossible, being the proposer, of course, the starter of all this chaos—known-to-be chaos—but he does.
He doesn't forget the long game itself, oh, God, no, that scares him shitless still, knowing, or not so knowing, when it'll be one no longer. He can still remember all as clearly the Ski Lodge, talking with Maya, almost flirting with Maya, making that first move (on the board he himself could not label), because there are some moments you remember forever, right?
So, no, he doesn't forget the long game.
He just forgets what it means.
Maya's gonna call the authority. She doesn't care. She doesn't, she doesn't—lock up Shawn and Katy for all she damn cares, because, well, she really doesn't.
But her phone's on her bed, her suitcase it wide open, and there's Cory's old portable TV blaring these same insipid (ins-cough-pirational) word like living poison, "College. There is no elevator to—" Y'ALL CAN GO FUCK YOURSELVES YOU SLIMY GOOD-FOR-NOTHING TOADS. Of course, Maya has always been the polite, patient one, so she refrains from strangling the damn "wisdom-givers". The more you take, the more you lose.
Maya sucks in her breath.
This is college. Three years since everything, and it's college. Turns here, twists there, forget all of that, bleh blows over, and then bang zap zip it's college. College. Seven damn words, hold onto your dignity, woman. Maya promises herself she'll give herself ten seconds into NYU without falling apart.
She remembers, an outline, silhouette-like, Josh's outburst. She'd held his hand then, quietly, reassuringly, nothing more, nothing else. I'm not ready... you think you are, but then you're not, he'd said, and he'd given her the most hopeless look he ever had. And then he let go of her hand like it had stung him. Maybe it had.
But that was almost three years ago.
Maya's not fifteen anymore. She hasn't been, not for a very, very long time, and perhaps Maya misses it, perhaps she doesn't, but it feels like seven lifetimes.
She's different from that girl. Crap, she's different to sixteen-year-old Maya... seventeen-year-old Maya, even. Because in that last year, Josh stopped visiting. He'd stopped passing her pearls of wisdom (okay, kinda... anything better than the shit on tape Shawn had given her); he'd stopped reassuring her; he'd stop just being there. And yes, there had been that emptiness, because surely, surely, he had been her friend (and I'd never want you not to be in my life her ass), and friends don't disappear like that. He had been worked up with school, to an extent he could have exploded, yes, Maya understood that, but she knew—and pretty sure as hell she knew he knew, too—she'd do the same for him. In the last year, it was like the long game... stopped.
Maya has her sixth sense. She knows.
She's over that now (as she reminds herself most times). Because it feels free... free to be awol from this mess they'd called an in-between of friendship and a... an understood "crush", of some sorts. It feels nice. So nice Maya wants to forget it... and almost she does (most definitely he does). But there's that one thing that gets stuck. A maybe. A someday. Their someday. It sounds (ahem—sounded) promising, because Maya always forgets the same fact, over, and over again, because once a girl who'd only known a hope for suckers, she'd believed in "someday".
And Maya's making too much of a big deal of this. Evidently.
She switches the TV off in fuming vexation, zips her bags in something more, and decides it's best to repeatedly bang her forehead on her desk in almost exasperation, because she doesn't want to go.
Man, four years without her right hand. No Riley (she's gotten into Yale of course, but who wouldn't have guessed?), no Huckleberry (off to old Texan blood for him, it was, and Maya knows it'll be hard for him and Riley, but they make up something Maya will probably forever envy, so she has no doubt they won't make it through), and no Farkle (with Smackle he's off to some high state place, a name too long for Maya to even try and remember), and with none of her gang, what is she?
A poor, wandering girl in NYU, looking, scrambling on dirt, to find something.
"Baby girl?"
Maya rolls her eyes, heaves her suitcase and many duffel bags off of her bed, and walks to the door. Shawn stood out their waiting, an arm casually on Katy's, waaaay too much emotion on their faces. Maya groans, sweeps her annoying blonde hair over her straining shoulder, and makes for the car.
New York University, here we fucking come.
Shawn's still way too new to this whole parentage thing. But Maya still needs to give him the points for trying.
Maya lets them go, and sharply breathes, clamping her eyes shut. This is not college, this is not college.
Oh, screw it. Screw everything. Screw her own bloody obnoxiousness... her stroppiness. Screw her hyperbole, just screw everything.
Because Girl meets Uni now.
Long games, short games, Maya's past is Maya's past, and although it seems like yesterday, Maya is at Maya's future now, and whatever it holds, Maya needs to decide for herself.
So she promises herself she'll try.
a/n: maya and josh were supposed to meet, but i lost inspiration. and i guess technically she's not even in nyu, buuut... :D once again, thank you all for feedback, it means so much to me:)
also, i guess it's going to be kind of obvious what comes next, right? this concept's slightly overused, i know that, and i'm going to try and make it as different as possible. this is going to drone out a bit (as i hope), being veeeerry slow-burn, so yeah, just letting you know, in case. and chapters will be supposedly longer, i'm just in too much of a rush to get this finished, lol :D
okaaaaay so my a/ns always seem to be longer than i hope, but yeah, this wasn't exactly her in college.. but next chapter she will be, and settling in, and we just might have some josh interaction. another thing—this has been a bit josh-centric, like last chapter (i was really meant to keep it maya-centric, but i couldn't help it and bleh), but we'll have more maya in chapters to come :D