December 13th 2019

Chapter 347
Their Run Toward Progress

This was it. Their last day of class… Before they knew it they'd all be so knee deep, neck deep into finals that the rest wouldn't matter, but right now they were still on this side of it, and so this day felt rightfully huge. Sure, by now there was very little left for them to do. Lucas knew that his classes would either revolve solely on questions and other final prep, or would have so little class concentrated content as to not feel worthy of the name 'class.' He would be very surprised if any of them lasted very much more than about half the usually allotted time.

"Going out with a whisper more than a bang," was Bishop's way of putting it when they met up that morning.

"Yeah…" Lucas sighed with a nod. It almost felt like there should have been more to it. This was a lot of their final classes ever at this university, with most of them about to graduate and move on to whatever was next for them. Some would be looking for work, or already had work line up, and others, like Lucas, like Bishop, were carrying on with more schooling in their near future. No matter what, they'd all been here for four years, not so much in the grand scheme of things, but in the part of the scheme that was their immediate past, present, and future, it was a good chunk of who they were, coming to a close.

They'd shown up to their first class of the day, one of those they shared, and it had felt much more like they'd walked into a smaller version of the library. Everyone just sat on their own, or grouped up together, having set themselves to the task as marked on the board. They were to use this time to review the study guide, and to quietly ask their professor if they ever had any questions. Lucas and Bishop joined up two desks and sat down to start. This was to be their first final in the coming week, so they might as well, right?

Lucas' thoughts wandered soon enough, whether he meant them to do so or not. Sixteen days to go… By now, it wasn't just about the proposal, much as he would have thought about very little else. He and Maya were not only the best man and maid of honor to Zay and Nadine respectively, they were also their boots on the ground, their eyes and ears. They weren't exactly right in the middle of everything, not while they were still in Houston and the bride and groom to be's families were back in Austin, but they did what they could to weather the storm that was mothers and fathers and other relatives trying to get their hands in the middle of everything.

Without their intervention, they just knew one person or another would have changed countless details both great and small. It wouldn't have mattered that this was not what Zay and Nadine had wanted, oh no, not when their families were convinced they knew best. Lucas and Maya had not been chosen for no reason, they could get in there and ensure that everything stayed as it was supposed to be.

"Guardians of the Nuptials, that's us," Maya would joke, even as she'd have that whole air of pride about her. Lucas would laugh, and she'd stare at him like he was just begging for her to retaliate in some way. Going by how these 'retaliations' tended to end with laughter or kisses, she wasn't exactly that far off, now was she?

"Who you gonna call?" he'd added, and she'd lost it.

After the class/review period, Lucas and Bishop had gone off to the café. Even though finals were just around the corner, this was the last day of class, which meant most every student was actually just taking things easy between classes, just going about their day, like the calm before the storm.

"Hey," Dylan greeted them from across the counter when they walked up. "The usual?" he asked, with that small smile tucked into the corners of his mouth, reminding them how he loved the concept of knowing what people's 'usual' was. Where his friends were concerned, he knew just what they veered toward, in a variety of categories, from 'I didn't have time to eat breakfast before I left home,' to 'quick snack to take along to class,' to 'staring down the barrel of a long boring stretch in need of caffeine,' to 'afternoon respite,' and then some. "Or do you want the Graduate Special?" he now grinned.

"What's that?" Bishop asked, while Lucas gave his old friend a look like 'what did you do and is it legal?'

Dylan reached under the counter, pulling out a large white box, topped with a golden sticker that showed the name of the bakery where Sophie had worked up until she graduated from the academy. When he opened the box, Lucas and Bishop found the slots inside were still halfway filled with several identical small cakes, topped with graduation caps traced in icing along with '2025.'

"Courtesy of our friend Ellie Beale, and reserved for our graduates to be," Dylan revealed. "It was my idea," he proudly added. "I got like ten boxes of these, I'm on my fourth now. You should take one for Maya and Leona, unless they're going to come out here today, too."

Lucas: Hurry up, Dylan's got special cake.

Maya: Consider me hurrying!

Ten minutes later, Lucas spotted her coming in, stopping at the counter, and soon after walking toward them with a small cake on a plate in one hand and a coffee in the other. She joined him, and Bishop, and Leona, who'd already shown up a few minutes earlier. There were now four plates on the table, and it was a wonder all of them had waited so patiently for her to arrive, none of them tucking in yet.

"Is he still working here next week or is this his last day, too?" Leona wondered, nodding over to where Dylan was serving another future graduate their small cake.

"He'll still be here through finals," Lucas nodded, as they all went digging their forks at the cakes sitting before them.

"What's he going to do once you all go back to Austin?" Bishop inquired.

"He hasn't said yet," Maya shrugged. "All he will say is that he's 'got plans,'" she told them in air quotes. "No idea what those are going to be, but none of us are worried about him. If he says he's got something, then he's got something." Lucas nodded in agreement of this statement.

After their cake break, they all had the rest of their day to get to, and as the girls went on their way, soon Bishop was also off in a separate direction from Lucas, though they would be reunited once more before the day was through. This came to be in Hank Hillard's class, which was to be the last he'd have at the university. If that wasn't perfect, then he didn't know what could. Finishing out his weeks in this environment governed by his uncle was about as good as he could hope to find.

He'd had three years with the guy, and honestly Lucas wished he could have even more. He would, of course, as far as his having his uncle in his life, yes. But Uncle Hank was a different thing than Professor Hillard. And he wanted very much to sit and listen to the professor some more. Lucas would every so often entertain this thought like 'what if he came and taught at the vet school?' Mr. Matthews had gone from being Maya's middle school teacher to being her high school one, in two different states, so why not have Hank do the same here?

Wishful thinking aside, Lucas was just glad that choices he'd made, choices he and Maya together had made, had brought him in the path of knowing his uncle and his aunt and all his cousins. Had they gone somewhere else they would perhaps never have met. He'd considered this several times before, and whenever he would end up thinking about it again, it just wouldn't have changed at all. He would still find himself thinking 'I'm so glad it all turned out the way it did.'

"I heard something about cake down in the café, is that true?" Hank asked as Lucas and Bishop walked into his classroom.

"Was there?" Lucas turned to Bishop, showing no flicker of recognition. Bishop played along perfectly, shrugging as though he had no idea.

"I control your grades, remember?" Hank joked.

"You do, and you do it so… What's the word?" Lucas turned to Bishop.

"Impartially," Bishop offered.

"Yeah, that one," Lucas smiled to his uncle, who met this with a very 'you may have won the battle, but you haven't won the war yet' kind of expression.

Lucas' final class was an open sort of discussion, as Hank asked them questions about the semester's material, stretching back to past classes with him over the last few years… Somehow, it took almost three years for him to learn that the reason he hadn't met the man until his second year was that, in his first year, Hank had been forced on leave, to recover after a bad fall. Another professor had taken on his classes, but otherwise it might have been that they would have had him for the past four years instead of three.

"It wasn't so bad, after a while," Hank told his nephew, when the period was over and most of the others were already gone or leaving. "Maggie was still very little, and I got to spend a lot of time with her, to watch her grow." The littlest Hillard was absolutely Daddy's girl through and through, had always been, and now they could sort of understand why.

"What are you doing tonight?" Lucas asked Bishop as the two of them walked out of class.

"Taking Leona out, while we can," Bishop told him. Lucas nodded. He had half a mind to do the same thing, with Maya, before they were all pulled into the vortex that was finals.

"Not working this weekend, we should get together to study sometime, yeah?"

"Absolutely. I'll text you?" Bishop asked before they parted ways.

Lucas: Class over, where are you?

Maya: Grandma's office!

Lucas headed off to Professor Robinson's office. When he got there, he found Maya in the process of packing up her desk, taking pictures and other things she'd stuck on the wall and removing the bits of tape before putting the things in a small box she'd brought from home. He also spotted a piece of graduate cake in the process of being consumed by his grandmother.

"What…" he pointed.

"You saw nothing," Patty waved her fork at him, beaming as she speared another piece of chocolate fluffiness. "Oh, Maya, dear, I want you to have this," she stood up a moment later and indicated a small plant sitting on the small table next to the couch.

"Are you sure?" Maya asked.

"You were the one who kept it alive all this time, I'm afraid I'd forget it and accidentally let it die. Please, I insist. Take it, and… let it remind you of this place," Patty gestured around the room. That was as good of a sales pitch as she could hope to make, to Maya without a doubt. Before long, she and Lucas were leaving, headed for the car, as he carried her box and she had the plant pot in her hands, green leaves swaying along as they went.

"Is it weird that I want to call it after her?" Maya pondered.

"The Patty Plant? Sounds good," Lucas suggested. Maya chuckled. Well, there was no point calling it anything else now, was there?

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners