A/N: The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!
September 30th 2022
Chapter 273
Our Season of Home & Sisters
Had it been up to them, had there been not a single reason for them to do otherwise, they could have kept going. They could have continued to hop from one country to another along with their girls for another week, and maybe more after that one… But reality was calling, and reality said that their three weeks were drawing to a close. This time, when they packed up everything again, it was to take that long journey from Australia over to good old Austin, Texas.
The girls were actually excited to get home. Alright, mostly the moment they realized they would be seeing their dogs again was when the littler ones were sold, while Marianne was eager to tell her friends about everything she'd seen and done. As much as they were all kind of sad to leave Georgie, Toph, and the place they called home, it was the least resistance they met in going through the departure process. Seeing this, both Lucas and Maya were left with this feeling like maybe they were being overly dramatic about the end of this trip? No matter how much they had loved all of it, they couldn't pretend as though travelling with all these small children – not to mention a just barely two-month-old babe – was by any means the relaxing experience that an extended vacation as a childless couple, or even one with fewer children, would have been. In the years to come, their girls would get older, and it would become something different, maybe easier to manage, but that didn't mean they would trade this trip in favor of another. They'd had a wonderful three weeks, and now it was ending.
The name of the game for the girls, while their parents were packing, was sort of a scavenger hunt. They were tasked with looking everywhere for anything of theirs that was around the room and had to be put in one of their suitcases or bags. So, while the two of them folded this, and closed up that, and put everything where it belonged, the girls would be zooming around, and every once in a while crying out in victory because they'd found a sock, or a toy, or…
"Kit, that doesn't belong to us, it belongs to the hotel," Maya sympathetically told Remy as she came brandishing a decoration from the living room area. She'd been staring intently at it since the day they'd checked in. Oh, she gave her the big 'I'm about to cry' face, but it was no use. "If we took it home, that would be stealing, and stealing is bad, remember?" Yes, yes, she sort of knew that… So, she dragged her feet the whole way, but she put it back.
"Bet I could check with them downstairs about where it came from. Maybe we can find one to buy for her," Lucas suggested.
"I'm surprised you haven't gone down there and given them the whole Huckleberry inquiry yet," Maya teased with a smirk. "Maybe they'll be so charmed they'll let you take it," she added with a whisper.
"Are you… encouraging me to…" he asked, an amused smile raising over his face.
"I'm not telling you to do anything more than be yourself. Believe me, that all works very well. You wouldn't believe the things some of the other teachers at school have said about you. Let's just say that if you suddenly found yourself a very single man, you'd have several hopefuls sitting right there, waiting to jump on," she revealed, trying not to burst out laughing at the way he almost seemed to blush, just before he considered that one condition, being that the two of them wouldn't be together for some reason or another, and his whole expression became 'no, let's not even go there.'
"I'll just go and ask where we can find that thing," he gestured toward the other room, and off he went to make his kitty cat Remy happy.
"I don't think there's anything left," Marianne came into the room a couple of minutes later. Maya listened, and she could hear a familiar voice on the television in the 'living room.' Since they'd flown here, the six and under crowd had become strangely invested in a cooking show that they'd landed on, over their first channel exploration. If they'd turned it on, she could assume the triplets and Mackenzie were out there now, sitting or standing in front of the television.
"Well, that's good then," Maya smiled while her firstborn came climbing on to the bed. "And you are…"
"I want to help," Marianne declared, leaning on the suitcase sitting there, which Maya interpreted as her being eager to push on the top so they could close the zipper, like they'd done back home, and every time they'd prepared to leave one hotel or another.
"Yeah, imagine that," Maya joked, and she got that big smile with its missing teeth flashed at her.
By the time Lucas returned, Marianne had just gotten her wish and was piled on to the suitcase while Maya pretended to strain more than she actually had to. His mission had been a far greater success than anticipated. As he explained, the hotel had many more of the small table decoration – in the event of one being broken or stolen by less considerate guests – and after hearing his appeal, they had gladly sold him one, which he now had in its small, blank white box. He placed it within their third and final shipment of souvenirs and other acquisitions – thanks to Georgie and Toph for the most part here – about to be sent on toward home. It would take a bit of time to arrive, but with any luck, it would be there in time to be given as a birthday gift to the triplets. He couldn't make it specifically for Remy or he'd have had to find something for Kacey and Lucy, too, but seeing as it would be in their room, and as only she of the three had shown a particular interest…
Finally, everyone was packed and ready to leave for the airport. Georgie and Toph accompanied them there, to see them off at the gate for the first flight of their long trip home. The plane buddies were reunited, and soon their game resumed. It would be the longest time some of them had ever spent in a stretch of planes and airports so long that it got to feel like a special bonus leg of their trip in itself. They fully expected one if not more of the girls to reach their limit before they reached Texas. In the end, it wasn't the length of the trip that became a problem so much as the turbulence they experienced near the end of one flight, which was enough of a frightful moment that both Lucy and Tori didn't want to get on the next plane and nearly threw a big enough fit that they couldn't even board. By the time they got the girls sufficiently calmed and willing to go ahead, they barely caught their flight. It was smooth sailing the whole way home after that, aided to some degree by Ella finding videos of the girls' new favorite chef on the internet for them to watch. Maya and Lucas were so thankful to this new curiosity that they were already looking up the man's cookbooks.
For as much as they had wished to keep travelling, Maya and Lucas were really glad when they touched down in Austin, and had all their bags, and were finally driving on the way home. They pointed out this thing or that one and the girls got so excited seeing their hometown again… Their excitement was everything they needed right then.
Coming up the lane toward their house, they saw up ahead that there were people outside, four of them, and the closer they got, they also spotted the orange ball zipping one way and another, dribbled here, tossed there… From afar, they could just about confirm that it was two on two, the Hart-Lane sisters versus Landau and Day. Dakota was the one to first notice the vehicles coming up the road, and so the game paused, the better to clear the way and welcome the returning travellers.
They might have been at the airport, waiting for them, but imagining the potential chaos of it all, it had been suggested they simply wait to greet them when they arrived home. And seeing the way they all reacted at being reunited, it really felt like they'd made the right call. This way, they could talk as long and as loud as they wanted. Plus, as they discovered, their France and Greece boxes had both arrived and were waiting inside, so they got to open those and go through everything with the four who'd been waiting on them. Marianne was especially eager to find her sketchbook and show her aunts what she'd done.
Seeing the two of them there, as they interacted with their nieces, and even earlier, when they'd been outside playing basketball… Without ever asking, Maya knew, to her great relief, that this thing that had been going on between her sisters over the last few months, this quiet rift that started around Emma's choice to leave school and possibly move back to Tucson had been fully mended, enough so that one wouldn't know it had ever happened. All was well once again in the land of Eliza and Emma, and their older sister was so glad to know it.
They had more good news, good developments to discover as their homecoming day progressed. One of them was much less of a surprise than it might have been perceived as by Emma, as she 'confessed' that she and Dakota had very recently started seeing one another, and that he had been staying at the house with her and Eliza and Ben for nearly a week. It all still had the markings of a new romance, which was to say that both parties had easy, shy smiles in surplus, unable to be contained. They had been existing in this small bubble of just the four of them in the Friar house, and suddenly to have more of them there, and knowing… It made it all a bit more real, and that was kind of exciting.
The other thing that came to be known, this one less a surprise and more of a relief, was that Emma had gone back on her plan to leave the house, to move to Tucson. As for school… She had never actually managed to drop out, which could have gone and made things so much worse. She'd wanted to, intended to, but could never quite pull the plug. But that was for the better because she'd found her passion for it again, and a lot of the thanks for that went to Dakota, to how the two of them had been talking, not just over the past few weeks while the Friars had been on vacation but before that, too. It had just sort of happened, and then she'd realized it was time to register for classes and… she was looking forward to it. She would finish out her degree, her final year up ahead, alongside her sister and best friend.
There was a great part of that afternoon and evening, with the four at the house and eventually with the grandparents dropping in like they couldn't help themselves wanting to see their son and daughter and all their granddaughters, spent with the girls showing off the bits of French and Greek that they'd picked up and retained. Lucas joked quietly to Maya how the triplets especially seemed to be under the impression that their grandparents hadn't missed them enough, so they had to be extra cute. She could see it, and it made her chuckle.
"I'm looking at these pictures from when we got to Paris, and then now… She's grown so much in these three weeks, hasn't she?" Maya commented in awe as she sat on the bed with Aubrey later that evening. The guests had gone away, everyone else was either asleep or, like them, winding down toward going to bed. She hadn't meant to settle down here like this, but she was absolutely a creature of her home comforts, and having been away from her own bed these past weeks, for how comfortable the three hotels' beds had all been… This one had been calling to her, and she'd answered that call with her baby girl in her arms.
"So much?" Lucas asked as he came and plopped down next to her, nearly calling on her mama ire if he had awakened the baby, but he hadn't, and gave a sheepish smile in apology. She squinted, but she showed him the photos. Now he could see it, and yeah… "No wonder my mom almost didn't want to let her go," he laughed lightly, reaching over to hold one small foot with smaller toes… Maya snorted. "More than usual, I mean."
"Yeah," she nodded. Even with the various pictures and videos they had made sure to send on to their families and friends over the past three weeks, in the evening before bed, it seemed that nothing compared to having the genuine article in front of them, and Miss Aubrey Juliet Friar had been out of their sight for what seemed like an eternity.
"It was really good, wasn't it?" Lucas reflected, after Maya had finally gotten up and gone to put the baby in her crib.
"It was kind of the best," she agreed, returning, and climbing back up on the bed, there to be greeted with open arms she slid into without pause. "We need to do it again."
"We will, definitely," he agreed, pressing a kiss to the side of her face. "Maybe just the one place next time," he suggested after a moment.
"Yeah, that," Maya laughed. "Even though," she pointed a finger, "Even though we did pretty well, all things considered, huh? Fourteen of us, half as many kids, including that little peanut over there… We were on top of our game," she gloriously declared.
"Yeah, we were," Lucas nodded. "Any ideas where you'd like to go next time?" She pondered the question, and he knew she was, as she was lightly drumming her fingers at his chest.
"I don't know, this might be something we need to decide on because something inspired us, because we really want to go," she reasoned, and he hummed his agreement. "We'll think of something. We've got a year to figure it out… Just imagine, we'll have all of them walking by then," she pointed out, and he laughed, picturing little Aubrey now chasing after her sisters just as Mackenzie did. Maybe the next year didn't have to come so soon… They could take their time.
TO BE CONTINUED
See you tomorrow! - mooners
