("There is a house built out of stone
Wooden floors, walls and window sills
Tables and chairs worn by all of the dust
This is a place where I don't feel alone
This is a place where I feel at home."
"'Cause, I built a home
For you
For me."
"Until it disappeared
From me
From you.
And now, it's time to leave and turn to dust.")
- The Cinematic Orchestra (feat. Patrick Watson), "To Build a Home"
January 2021
Age 20
Year 4, Special Agent
"Well what do you think is going on with her?"
Maya was staring out the window at Riley, who had been sitting outside in the below-freezing temperature for a solid twenty minutes. Her back was to Maya, but at least she was wearing a coat. Maya chewed on her lip and rested her forearms down on the windowsill.
"Do you think she's suicidal?"
Maya frowned, even though she knew Josh couldn't see her face from where he was standing behind her at the kitchen counter, cutting up vegetables. "You're not serious."
"She's gone through phases like this," Josh pointed out. "When she found out about us. When Lucas found out about us."
"Then what's the trigger this time?"
Maya heard him set down the knife and begin to scoop the vegetables into a bowl. "Lucas has been gone three days."
"Did he tell you what the meetings were supposed to be about?" Maya asked, finally turning to see Josh with a dishtowel tossed over his shoulder, pulling open a drawer to fish out some cooking utensil.
"All he said was that he had meetings with administration and that he'd be back soon," Josh shrugged.
"Well, what do you think they're about?"
Josh sighed, rolling his eyes. "Maybe he's pregnant."
Maya glared at him. "I'm being serious."
"Maya, I have no idea. We won't know until either he tells us, or they tell us." He wiped his hands on the towel still resting over his shoulder. "Do you want to help me with this or not?"
Maya rolled her own eyes, straightening as she headed for the door. "You look like you've got a good handle on it. I'll go tell her dinner's ready."
"It's not though," Josh reminded her exasperatedly.
"Maybe it will be by the time I finish talking to her.
She pulled her winter coat off the hooks near the door as she braved the early January cold, remembering why she hated winter. She didn't know how Riley could sit out here this long, but it had to be some sign of something wrong. Why would anyone willingly sit in the cold?
As she trekked towards the girl, she watched the wind get caught in Riley's hair, blowing it out in front of her. Getting closer, she saw that Riley was actually shivering, although she hadn't moved her eyes from the frozen lake in front of them, at the far front of their plot of land.
Settling down on the bench next to her friend, Maya rubbed her hands together and winced at the bite of cold through her pants.
"What are you doing out here?" Riley murmured, her eyes staring emptily out at the water.
"What are you doing out here?" Maya returned.
"Thinking."
As if her answer had been a command, several moments passed in silence as Maya just watched her, wondering how she could hole herself up in her head so completely.
"We need to talk about it," Maya finally broke the silence, as she saw Riley's gaze flick down to her own hands, resting on her lap.
"Talk about what?" She asked softly, biting her lip.
"You've changed since I came back," Maya observed bluntly. "You change a lot but this time seems different. We're worried about you."
"I can handle myself."
"We're all aware you are in peak physical form," Maya assured her, "but your mental state is just as important and it's deteriorating."
As if that sentence was a switch that she'd been aching to flip, Riley finally started talking.
"Maya, you missed… you missed a lot," she began slowly. "When you got shot…Lucas and I were alone together most of the time, either in the safe house or on missions. Josh pretty much never left the hospital unless he was meeting with someone. Things changed."
"How do you mean?"
Riley blew all her breath out, visible in the cold air. "I've loved Lucas for years. And I was too scared to let him get close to me while we were in the academy because I was so scared of breaking the rules. But here there's no rules, and with you and Josh, Lucas… I stopped pushing him away."
"Good, right?" Maya checked, unsure why Riley seemed so anxious.
Riley swallowed. "I love him, Maya, but after pushing him away for so long and then letting him back in… I can't be objective. I can't do that the way you can. I'm just not wired that way."
Maya stared at her. "What are you saying, Riley?"
Riley looked down, her words coming out quiet. "We're putting in our papers for a temporary hiatus."
"What?" Maya asked, standing up quickly.
"I've done this for so long, Maya," Riley tried to explain.
"You're breaking up the team? Without even talking to us about it?" Maya asked.
"It's just a hiatus, Maya, to figure out what we want to do," Riley insisted.
"Break leads to break up," Maya shot back. "You'll just be more sure that you can't do this anymore."
"That's not necessarily true," Riley argued, although she didn't stand up.
"If there's no team, there's no this," Maya pointed out, jerking her hand between the two of them and back at the house. "We go back to being agents, we go back to being alone."
"Not necessarily," Riley repeated.
"Riley, this is my family, don't you get that?" Maya begged, her eyes pleading with her best friend. "You have a family, you have parents, two brothers, a home. I don't. This is all I have and if you break up the team I have nothing. We break apart, we leave the safe house, we get assigned separate missions with separate people and we'll probably never see each other. Tell me you understand that!"
"Don't you think I've thought this through, Maya?" Riley asked, finally standing up. "Don't you think I've been killing myself over this for months, trying to decide the right thing to do?"
"You're making the wrong choice, Riley," Maya spat. "Think harder."
"You can request partnership," Riley tried.
"You and I both know that's not how administration works," Maya shot back bitterly.
Riley stared at her, her expression sad, before she whispered, "I'm sorry, Maya. I just can't do this anymore." As she turned away towards the house, Maya saw a tear fall from her cheek, and Riley swallowed, closing her eyes and breaking the glassy barrier to let the rest of them go.
"If you do this I'll never forgive you." Maya's voice had gone cold, but it was all she had left.
She knew there was nothing Riley wished more than for the chance to go back and undo it all. Fix the parts where everything went wrong and steer the future the right way. But she couldn't.
All Maya could see in her mind was everything she had worked for slipping away like soap in wet hands; desperately trying to hold on to it but failing. She sank down on the bench as Riley's footsteps got further away, her own eyes widening and chest sinking as she thought about what Riley was doing.
She wasn't just making a choice for herself or even for Lucas. She was destroying the one family, the one home Maya had ever had.
Her father abandoned her when she was a child.
Her mother quite literally chose to no longer be her mother.
She was a ward of the state, an orphan, a child owned by the organization she'd been chosen for. But she chose Riley, she chose Josh, she chose Lucas. She chose to let them into her circle of trust, she chose to get attached in a way that she had never ever been attached to anyone else in her life. This was her home; this was her family.
It was literally all she had.
If Riley decided to destroy it, what would she have?
A/N: Chapters will be short going forward. Lots of stuff will happen in a short period of time so we'll basically be doing the next 12 chapters in the span of less than 3 months. (Yeah I have 12 chapters planned in part 3. Each chapter will definitely be shorter than the chapters in part 1 and 2 though.) (Now that I'm thinking about it, each part is shorter than the previous. Part 1 was 22 chapters, part 2 was 15 chapters, part 3 will be 12 half-sized chapters...)
We're in The Aftermath now.
I did not write my research essay. Instead, I wrote 2 chapters in 2 days. At least I was productive?
Kisses,
C
