May 7th 2022

Chapter 127
Our Power to Make Magic

"This is going to be a mess…" Maya breathed as she sat down on the basement steps and watched as Lucas pulled out the various boxes of decorations. Upstairs, they could both hear a cacophony of tiny girl giggles and running feet. "Playing with fire…" Maya added, eyes turned to the ceiling.

"It'll be fine," Lucas spoke with what she deemed to be much too much confidence.

"Okay, Girl Dad, if you say s… Shh, wait!" Maya moved to rise again and climbed up a few steps just before the basement door opened and she found herself face to face with five-year-old… "June, sweetie, are you looking for the bathroom again?" she asked in a jolly tone as she smiled to Marianne's little friend. The redhead nodded. "Yeah, it's not this one, uh… El? Em? You're one kid short out here!" she called out.

Further back, in the living room, the chaos they'd been hearing from below was shown to be something between a game of hide and seek and tag, between Marianne, her little sisters, her aunts Eliza and Emma, Priya's daughter, Lily, and Marianne's friends from preschool and the green group, Winnie Grayson, Harper Beaumont, and June Abernathy. Now June had split off from the group.

"Oh! Sorry, sorry," Emma came scurrying over. "Come on, I'll take you," she held out her hand and June took it. "Sorry," Emma mouthed before escorting the girl toward the actual bathroom.

"What are you doing, Mommy?" Marianne asked, now distracted from the game.

"Oh, I'm helping Daddy with a thing," Maya hooked her thumb back and immediately realized a potential mistake. They were always so proud of how helpful Marianne was as a person, but just now it was better off that she stayed here… "We've got things covered, pumpkin, I promise, okay? You go ahead and keep playing with your friends, yeah?"

"Okay," Marianne finally nodded.

"Great, go on," Maya smiled and nodded. Marianne still ran over to her, but only so long as it took for her to give a quick hug and a kiss to her mother's cheek before running off again. Maya laughed and shut the door again before letting out a breath and peering down the steps, where Lucas still waited. "I don't need this stress right now, you know?" she told him in a whisper, gesturing around the surface of her belly.

It was the evening of November 30th and in the Friar house that meant one very important thing… The Christmas Fairies were inbound. The two of them knew this, and Marianne knew it. Winnie knew it because she'd been here, at the house, one year ago on this night. So, as the month had advanced and the big day had approached, the tale of the fairies had spread across their group of friends. Neither Harper nor June had ever heard of these fairies, and the same went for Lily. They were somewhere between skeptic and intrigued, all of them, and so the solution had been simple: another sleepover, same as last year, only they would all be there this time, so they could see for themselves.

When Marianne had advanced the idea to her father, whether it was just the thought of letting all the girls experience it or a weakness for that big, bright smile on his baby girl's face, he had accepted at once. It wasn't until he told Maya about it, and she looked immediately concerned, that he had to at least admit the 'risks' of this scenario. How were they ever going to manage to decorate the house – including Marianne's own room, where the five girls were set to sleep – without a single one of them being accidentally awakened? It would only take one and then they could end up blowing the surprise for all of them, taking away the magic they all still believed in at the same time. Sure, sooner or later they'd have to realize that some of these things were only part of the holiday narrative, but they were all four or five years old. They still deserved to believe a little while longer, didn't they?

They'd already had to field that question with Marianne one week prior, when Lucas had picked her and Winnie up from preschool to find them both mildly shaken up because fellow five-year-old Adam Gray had laughed at them and declared that Santa wasn't real, and they were just babies for thinking that he was. They'd had to walk carefully. They didn't want to spin too wide of a lie, but they also just knew that it was still important to their daughter and her friend that there was a Santa, so if they could patch their concerns up in some way, they would do it.

Maybe that was part of the reason why it had been this important to Lucas that they pull this off, springing the Christmas Fairies on the house for all of them to see it, Marianne, the triplets, their guests… They believed in magic in this house. Whatever they had to do to make sure that it all went off without a hitch, they would do it.

Step one right here was to at least pull everything out of storage while there was sufficient noise upstairs to cover for them. The various boxes were stacked in wait until step two could be set in motion. Before that could happen, the girls had to be put to bed and allowed to fall soundly asleep. Or that was the plan, at least. Even as Maya and Lucas were putting on their very best bedtime story act for their expanded audience, they – and the girls – heard sounds from downstairs and paused.

"What's that?" Harper asked, sitting up at once.

"The fairies?" Lily popped up, too, excited.

"I think that's just the dogs," Lucas told them. They didn't look like they completely believed him.

"We can't look," Marianne informed her friends at once. "They won't come, they'll go away."

"She's right," Maya nodded. "She's absolutely right, go on, lie back down again, okay? That's it," she smiled as Harper and Lily settled down again. "Now, where were we?"

Once the stories had gotten everyone drifting off, Maya stuck around and started singing, the better to make sure that everyone would stay asleep, so Lucas went down to see what was going on. He soon discovered that their helpers had arrived. This year, these were Sam, Cara and Mateo, and Teddy and Priya, who had now joined Eliza and Emma in an effort to get the lights ready to be hung outside. Yes, the plan had been to wait until after the girls were all asleep, but they'd arrived early, and it just felt like it would make sense to at least get started with some of the preparations while they waited.

As soon as Maya came down to join them, they moved into action. Teddy teamed up with Sam, Emma, and Lucas and helped them with the lights and outdoor decorations. He was taking Cara's place this year while she helped the indoor team. Even before the entire enterprise was a covert one, she'd always been there to help with the lights, but she wasn't about to get anywhere near a ladder these days, so she'd had to relinquish her post and tag her brother in. She might have gotten much too much fun out of playing the petulant disappointment over this, though she was happy to help Maya and the others with the tree and indoor decorations. She wasn't exactly the most covert in her steps these days though, so she wasn't going to be one of those who'd have to sneak around to do the nursery and Marianne's room.

"This is such a fun idea," Priya declared with a smile as she and Eliza worked together to add the lights to the tree. "When Teddy told me about it all, I had to borrow it. I hope you don't mind." As she explained, while Lily was out here this evening, she and Teddy had taken the opportunity to decorate her apartment, so that when Lily would go home again the next day, she would get to discover that the fairies had been there, too.

"Oh, please," Maya insisted. "We got it from my aunt, our father's sister," she explained, indicating herself and her two sisters presently in the room. Cara and Eliza beamed as they nodded, thinking of Luna.

Maya was sure that, somewhere along with those smiles being about Kermit's little sister, some of their thoughts were also turned toward their brother and his girlfriend. After what had been a slightly extended courtship from afar for a while, Teddy and Priya had been comfortably dating for a few weeks shy of a year. It wasn't as though either one of them were hearing wedding bells just yet, or even thinking of moving in together, but on the latter at least it could have been a reasonable choice. Neither of them had been at all shy to confirm that Teddy had been spending most nights lately at Priya's apartment. If it wasn't for Lily, they might have moved in together by now, or at least alternated their nights between his place and hers.

Oh, but they didn't mind, especially not Teddy. The four-year-old girl was Priya's top priority, and as the months had gone by, she'd grown into one of those for Teddy, too. He loved that kid to bits, and to see her with him, it was becoming clear how the feeling was mutual. They wouldn't even have been allowed to meet or interact if Priya didn't feel confident about bringing them together, and Teddy did not take lightly the fact that she trusted him with her daughter the way she did. Now, with Christmas approaching, getting to be part of all that with his girlfriend and her daughter… They didn't know that they'd ever seen him so invested in the holiday. As Emma had previously told them, he'd lost a lot of that glow in him after their mother had passed away. He'd gotten some of it back when Maisie was born and she'd experienced it all with the wide eyes of a child who believed, and now that he had Lily in his life… Maya was very curious to see what the fairies had done to Priya's apartment…

Maybe the magical little creatures were real. They had definitely been on their side that night as they worked to keep quiet and carry on with the transformation without waking any of the eight girls sleeping under their roof, sometimes there in the room as they went around with lights, and figurines, and – hardest of all – small bells… Oh, they definitely had a couple of close calls, which had left the people involved to freeze and wait, holding their breaths and feeling like Christmas spies more than fairies. But everything went as it had to go, and eventually their helpers were able to leave, while Maya, Lucas, Eliza, and Emma all went to sleep.

They had no need for alarm clocks in the morning, not when there was a very sudden and growing level of small girl squealing echoing out from the room at the end of the hall. The quintet woke up, and discovered, and cried out, and this got the triplets awake, too, slightly more frantic and distressed in their case. But then their parents came along, and they got them to calm down again. Once they did calm down, the one-year-olds started to look around the nursery, and… they were seeing it. Things were different all of a sudden. They were put on their feet, and they all walked around, heads turned up and hands probing where they could.

"What? What?" their voices all asked over one another. That was their new favorite word these days because they only had to see something they didn't know or understand and say the word and then someone would explain.

"Magic," Lucas proudly informed the little blondes as they stared at him. "The Christmas Fairies were here, and they brought magic," he told them. And so, they had…

TO BE CONTINUED


See you tomorrow! - mooners