A/N: The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!

May 5th 2020

Chapter 126
Their Rally Around Sam

When she woke up on Friday morning, Maya opened her eyes to look upon the morning sun with the lingering remnants of the dream she'd had. In this dream, as impossible as it was for such a thing to have ever happened, she was visited by a small boy she knew at once to be Sam. He was all of five years old, and so she was only thirteen herself. It was the middle of the night, and she was asleep in her bed, until the sound of the door opening and the spilling of light into her darkened room brought her back around to open her eyes and find the boy standing there, large glasses over his face, and a Superman figure clutched under his arm.

"Come on," her younger self whispered, holding up the covers like she was used to these visits. In a moment, the small boy would come scurrying up, climbing up to join his big sister. She would take the glasses from his face and set them down on the night stand, and he would curl up with her as she settled back down. "What's the matter, Sammy? Did you have a bad dream again?" she would ask, and the boy would nod at once. "It's okay, I've got you now. No monsters here."

"Not monsters," little Sam insisted.

"What is it then?" she asked, but then… if he said anything, she didn't remember it. After that, she was awake, left frustrated by the unknown.

"Morning there, Restless Leg," Lucas muttered, revealing himself to be awake as well. Maya turned over until she was facing him and the might of the beard. He was getting a good handle on keeping the thing nice and trimmed, she had to say, enough to make her wonder if he might keep it after the holidays after all.

"Did I kick you?" Maya inquired.

"Just a bit," he confirmed, making her bite back a chuckle.

"Any wounded?"

"Mostly shins," Lucas assured her, even as she leaned in to kiss him good morning. "What was going on in that head? Strange dream or the foundation of a new masterpiece?"

"Mm, door number one," she revealed, propping her head up. Lucas was giving her those 'tell me stuff' eyes. "I was like thirteen again, and Sam was there, he was little, five or so, and he came to my room in the middle of the night because he had a bad dream."

"Except you didn't know each other back then," Lucas filled in the blanks.

"The very slightest of the logic issues in this scenario," Maya nodded. "I mean, I know where it comes from, that desire. Growing up with the others, I can't count how many times one or two of them showed up like that and crawled in with me… or both of us." Lucas smiled, thinking fondly of those moments, which he himself would not have experienced either, having no younger siblings of his own. "Sam was just… a bit too old for that by the time he came into the picture, but I know, if we had known each other back then, I could have been there for him, and he would have come to me when he needed it…"

If she thought about it, the little face she'd been staring at was really Wyatt's, with Sam's glasses thrown over it as some way to signify that this was who he was meant to be. Her Hart brothers resembled one another enough that anyone would know that they were brothers to one another, but if she looked at a picture of Sam at five, he distinctly looked like himself and not Wyatt. Her mind had likely made the substitution because Wyatt was the only one of the two she could recall in motion at that age.

"I just don't remember what it was he was coming to me for, and it feels like I'm supposed to… And I know, I know it has to do with how he misses home, and he's torn, and how… I'm just trying to… to be there for him, to look out for him, but if that's what it is, then I would really appreciate if my brain would have been kind enough to finish and tell me just… what next?"

"I'm not a dream… interpreter…" Lucas told her, but what I'm getting is maybe it's telling you that you're doing exactly what he needs you to do already, which is to be there for him. You're here, you're a safe place… and that's what he needs." Maya took this in with a smirk.

"I think the beard is giving you powers," she teased, which made him laugh.

"I promise to only use them for good."

The day went on, all in all a regular one. School here, work there… Maya got home first, after a stopover at the post office. She hadn't been sure, when it hadn't arrived the day before, whether the package would arrive for today. But then the tracking had alerted her that it was ready for pickup, so she'd finished up what she had left to do at the theater and she'd gone on to retrieve her item. When she came home, she went up and put the box in her closet. This would be her sort of 'break in case of emergency' contingency. If the time came that they needed a little extra push to assist Sam… it would be there, with markings on the box very reminiscent of a birthday present she had received a few years back.

By the end of the night, Maya would come to realize she'd never needed it, not this time.

"Hey, Maya!" Cecilia greeted her as she came through the door just as her boyfriend's sister was coming down the stairs again.

"Hey… aren't you still supposed to be in school?" Maya checked the time. It wasn't a huge gap, but by all accounts she shouldn't have been here for a half hour at the least.

"Technically, yes, but I realized I forgot something at home when I left this morning, and I didn't want to have to wait until last period was over, go back to get it, and then come here," the girl confessed.

"So you just left?" Maya tried not to sound so much like a hall monitor.

"I may have told them that my leg was hurting," Cecilia expanded on her explanation with a sheepish smile. "It has to be good for something, right?" she shrugged after a beat.

"What was so important that you had to play the leg card?" Maya asked, curiosity getting the best of her.

"Special edition box sets, you know how he is with all the special features and the commentaries," Cecilia revealed. The smile on her face here was just too pure and full of love for anyone to ever argue on the merit of her bailing out of one period.

"I'm familiar, yes," Maya chuckled.

Dora arrived next, no more than fifteen minutes after Cecilia had done do, which left Maya to ask the same question of Lucas' cousin as she'd done with the first of their guests.

"I had to go home for some batteries," the girl declared, pointing to her ears. "I left the pack on my bed when I was packing." Maya looked at her, looked at Cecilia.

"You're lucky I don't work at either of your schools, you would have been so busted," she shook her head at the pair of them. "You know the way, if you want to go drop off your bags," she pointed up the stairs, and the girls moved as one, Dora trailing after Cecilia and carrying her bags for her as she went. The closer they got to the top, Maya could just make out whispers being exchanged. "When did I become the grown up," she muttered to herself as she went to check on the dogs.

When Sam arrived, Maya could tell he had been looking forward to tonight as the day had gone by. He found the girls waiting for him in the living room, where they had been looking at the various movies they had both brought, and the ones they had found set aside by him, and in no time he was sitting with them and his sister, talking about this one or that one. They weren't the only ones who would be around for the movie portion of the night. The Schmidt twins arrived almost back to back with Lucas, and then Missy came along, with Kai Avelino in tow.

When Maya had invited them both, on the morning of fence painting, she had left her neighbor with the challenge of bringing some prime zombie flick, which she hoped would make way for a healthy dose of discussion between the budding friends/maybe more than friends.

Pizzas were ordered and soon delivered, at which point the group settled before the television and the first movie was selected and started. The various discs with their special features would be for the trio of friends to dig into later on, once the guests had gone. Even so, all through the movies, Maya and Lucas could see Sam lean in to whisper something to Cecilia and Dora, one sitting at his side, the other on the ground at their feet. There had been that small moment where they had all gone to sit where Maya had wondered if there might be a bit of a situation, if Sam ended up between the two girls, but it never became an issue. Maybe this night was as much for Sam as it was for her to go ahead and breathe a little, not worry so much.

What she was able to see, as the night went on, was how her brother seemed happier now than he'd been in a while, since even before Halloween and all that bit of chaos. She would think it had come along halfway between the night itself and the anticipation of it throughout the week, where Sam had managed to reclaim some peace of mind. Later on, after the Schmidts and Missy and Kai had gone on home, she also learned that he'd come up with a solution to one problem which had been hanging over his head recently, regarding the coming holidays.

"Are we going to have all the decorations up before I start finals this year?" Sam asked, as Maya came back into the house after seeing Missy off. She'd waited along as Kai went off to catch his ride home with the twins.

"Uh, yeah, why? You study better if it's festive?" she joked.

"No… Well, maybe… It's just I love doing that with you and Lucas," Sam explained, which made his sister smile. "And I was thinking I'd like to get going like the day after finals."

"Get going to where?" Maya asked, unsure.

"Tucson," Sam told her. "I'm going to stay out there with everyone until they leave for Louisiana, and then I'll come back so I'm here for Christmas."

Maya looked at him there for a moment, her kid brother all self-assured once again, before moving up to pull him into a good, strong hug. In living together for the first time in their lives, over the past year and a half, just about, Maya and Sam had sort of gone and developed this language of hugs, something between making up for lost time and really just holding to the concept of expressing oneself with or without words. When Maya held her brother here, she was showing her happiness for him, and when Sam held his sister, too, he showed his gratitude for her.

"You know, you might check and see when the girls finish school before the break, they might be able to go and visit you out there for a few days," Maya suggested. Sam looked at her for a moment, considering this, before heading into the living room to find the girls. As she watched him go, Maya caught the sound of a low whistle from above and turned to find Lucas looking at her from the top of the stairs. He waved for her to join him and she went, taking one more look back to find the trio talking excitedly, which she took to mean that the girls were both on board for a trip to Arizona.

"Welcome to the other sleepover," Lucas offered his hand to lead her along the hall.

"Why, thank you, sir," Maya pulled on her drawl.

"I would have called it the adult sleepover, but it might have put a bit too much pressure on whatever happens next while those three are watching their movie stuff," Lucas went on, which had her giggling.

"You never know, the night is young, and we're not that old."

They ended up sat on the bed, with Maya's laptop, as they worked to cross off a couple of things off of Wedding Planner Zvolensky's to-do list. She would send them things here and there, wanting them to choose a color for this, or a song for that… They tended to take a lot of time to decide, as any presentation of choices had a way of pulling them into heavy amounts of debate and recollection. On this night, for instance, when they had paused to listen as Sam and the girls went up to the attic, nearly four hours had gone by, and they were barely cracking into the third 'to do.'

"You know what, I don't care if Sophie says it takes us forever to get back to her, I love this," Lucas gestured between the two of them sitting there.

"Yeah, me, too," Maya beamed, feeling all giddy on the inside. Conversation had always been so easy between the two of them, had been since all the way back in 7th grade, when it had been him and her sitting on the steps outside of school, those mornings when he had sessions with the guidance counselor. Nowadays, with over eleven years' worth of material to pull from, they could easily have talked their way through the night if not for the fact that he was working in the morning, and they were 'on the clock' with a trio of minors upstairs.

"Tonight was pretty good, wasn't it?" Lucas asked as they readied themselves to go to sleep.

"It was everything I… Oh…" Maya laughed.

"What?" Lucas asked.

"I completely forgot about the box from Abigail," she whispered, turning back to him. "Should I just give it to him anyway? Or do I hold on to it for the next time he needs a bit of home?"

"What if there's food in there?" Lucas pointed out.

"Good point," Maya went and retrieved the box, bringing it halfway up the attic steps before climbing back down and calling up. "Special delivery!"

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners