A/N: One day behind...

August 26th 2023

Chapter 224
We Begin Again

"Alright, you guys know what you have to do, right?" Lucas looked down at the boys as they all stepped into the building together. He had four of his sons accompanying him that day, the eldest of them having stayed behind to play with his friends. Noah and Jamie both had one of the twins by their side, and they held hands with their younger brother, which was very much the way to go, as Simon and Jack both looked intent on making the most of their walking legs.

"Don't let go," Noah replied, looking down at Simon, while Jamie held up his and Jack's joined hands. Jack let out a noise at this like he was as surprised as he was amused by the sudden swing of his arm, which made Jamie look back at him with a proud smile.

"If you do, I need to be able to see the four of you, got it?" Lucas told the boys, and they nodded. Whether the twins understood was unlikely, but they imitated their brothers anyway. "Right, let's go see how it's going in there."

Was there potential for things to go just a bit sideways whenever he brought the children into this place full of dogs in need of loving homes? Of course. But they usually knew what they were walking into and had no problems, so he would take them with him at every chance he got. It was something that felt very much part of their family's DNA, what made them The Friars together. Even the littlest of them, at fourteen months, would walk through the place, looking very much like they were somewhere they belonged.

Lucas had never been so involved with the place as he had been in the last couple of weeks, and really he could not have been happier with his choice. His time was very much kept occupied with everything that he did, which meant that there wasn't much left unfilled, but he did not mind this at all. He worked at the office with his father, he taught young riders at the ranch and of course worked on his series with Ava there. And now he had the shelter, which was easily the thing that was closest to his originally intended career.

Being back here, it took him back to the subjects he had studied, just a handful of years ago. He hadn't been that far into his college education at the time he'd changed paths, so he'd still had a lot to learn, something that the people at the shelter were fully aware of, just as they knew that he made his choice for the right reason. They had taken this along with the thought of essentially dusting off the old and adding in all the new that they could, whenever the chance presented itself. Lucas appreciated this very much, and he learned from them when they offered new knowledge, but the most important thing he picked up from this exercise was that this intake only made him happy to learn again. It didn't make him think that he needed to give up his career and the degree he'd seen through to the end in favor of reintegrating the college life for the next however many years of his life and his family's. It wasn't the first time that he was shown his own contentment, but each one was as important as the one that had come before, and he knew it wouldn't be the last.

Meanwhile, back at the house, Maya was pulled from the kitchen table after hearing a lot of shouting followed by a crashing noise and some barking. She didn't know what she had expected to find, but nothing looked out of place save for the absence of a trio of six-year-old kids.

"Hey, guys?" she called. A moment later, their faces came into view, one after the other. Elliott gave a sheepish smile that was very much like his father's. Max Farrell looked as though he was trying not to laugh. And Max McAllister was looking to her two best friends and back to her host, even as Sirius nudged her arm and she pet him on the head. "What happened out here?" Maya asked, approaching them. As best she could tell, they'd all tumbled over the edge of the couch, but they were clearly perfectly fine.

"We're superheroes, Mom," Elliott informed her, while Max and Max gave her a smile that very much said 'we're telling you this because we trust you, but it's a secret, okay?'

"Oh, sure, sure, yes," Maya nodded, playing along as she approached them. "Tell me something though, are you the kind of superhero that doesn't get hurt when they do all their hero work? Or are you the human kind that will definitely break something if they're not careful?" The message was clear, and they understood it.

"We'll be careful, we promise," Max nodded, and Maya gave her a smile. It would have been easy for people to look at her, being 'the girl' in their trio and assume that she'd be the more levelheaded one, keeping the two boys in line, but anyone who knew those kids would know that title fell on her firstborn's shoulders. The other two were as equally reckless to the other as they could get.

Maya returned to the kitchen but, rather than returning to her work at the table, she made a stop first to collect some snacks for the 'great heroes,' hoping maybe to give them sufficient reason to keep their butts seated a while and allow her to focus on what she had to do instead of trying to make sure she got to send her young guests home in the same condition as they had been dropped off by their respective parents. When this was done, she finally got back to her seat, where she could finish up her plans ahead of her return to work in a couple of days.

She had been looking forward to it. She was nervous, how could she not be, but she was eager to get back to them, to her groups of seventh and eighth graders. This year had not been anything like what she had imagined it would be, not since what had happened with the baby. Right about now she would have been looking forward to going on leave, not returning from it. The thing she couldn't stop thinking about just now was that for the most part her students had no idea why she had been gone. They knew that something had been wrong with her to some degree, yes, but not what that something was. As she had been preparing for her return to class, she'd been left to contemplate just what she would tell them when she'd go back to class and, honestly, she still had no idea what she would tell them, if she would be honest and simply tell them the truth. They were young, but not so young that they couldn't be trusted with the information, but did that mean she should share it?

After a while of sitting there with no further incident from out in the heroes' hall, she had finished what needed doing, and without putting too much thought into it, she'd shifted away from work and started to draw. She'd had plenty more time to devote to her art over the last several weeks, whether she'd set out for it or not, and as she sat there that day, she really had to appreciate how much it had given her in the span of what had very much been a recovery for her. She didn't get as much time to devote to this side of her creativity as she used to do, which was completely normal, with what her life was from day to day, but then when she would get to stop and give it even as little as five minutes, it would take her into this place she loved to be. And if she got to stay in that place for an hour and some, well…

She wasn't a thirteen-year-old trying to figure out who she was supposed to be after being taken away from everything and everyone she knew, moving out to Texas with her mother, not anymore. Now, she was a freshly twenty-eight-year-old woman, with a husband and six children, with a home, and a career as a teacher, and a co-owned bakery business with her aunt. If that thirteen-year-old girl would have been shocked to know this, the girl roughly halfway between them who'd suddenly been faced with motherhood as she'd barely started college would not have believed it could be real. But they were all one and the same, and through everything that they had experienced in their life, this right here, this had been their constant refuge, their outlet.

"Wow…" Ava's voice startled her, and she barely managed to lift her pencil away before it could scratch an unfortunate line across her work. The twelve-year-old was just as startled when she realized this, too, but Maya touched her arm, reassuring her that all was well before she could go and give her a smile.

"You like it?" she asked, and her daughter brightened all over again.

"I love it," she nodded. Maya put an arm around her waist, and Ava leaned to her, putting her arm around her shoulders.

"What can I do for you, Sweetpea?"

"Oh, I'm okay, I was just coming to get snacks for Kelsey and me," she explained, and much as she would have enjoyed staying in this side hug with her, Maya moved to rise instead. "It's okay, Mama, you don't have to…" Ava started to say, pausing only as she realized that snacks had already been prepared for her and her friend, at the same time as they had been done for her brother and his friends. "Oh… Okay," she smiled, taking the plate as it was offered to her. "Thank you." Maya could have noted the way her daughter still had the tendency to feel out of place when people did things for her before she ever had to do them for herself, but she instead focused on the happier circumstances of her day.

"How's it going down there?" she inquired with a light smirk that pulled just the dose of preteen embarrassment she had expected to receive in talking of her daughter and the girl she had feelings for, the girl who had feelings for her, too.

"All good, Mama," Ava promised before shuffling off with her acquired snacks.

It wasn't that they were girlfriends all of a sudden – and the suggestion that the word might have been put on the table at any time would be another chance for Maya or Lucas to see their daughter's cheeks turn bright pink – but they were definitely a notch higher than they had been in their friendship before Ronnie the Jerk had gone and read out Ava's song to Kelsey out loud for all – including Kelsey – to hear. The proof of it was in how much more time the two girls had taken to spending with one another. School was easy, they were both expected there every day of the week, and they were in all those classes together.

Beyond school, they had the ranch, their riding lessons, but after that they were now spending the vast majority of their free time at either one of the Friar or Farrell homes, like they were alternating days. As of late, they either had both girls or neither at table for dinner every night, only ever the one that belonged with them by herself in the very rare occasion where they couldn't both be there.

When they would be at the Friar house, they would spend much of their time down in Ava's room. They had gone far beyond the point where she had worried about her room being in the basement and considered it an obstacle that would keep away her wheelchair-using friend. She and Kelsey had long worked out the best means to get the latter in and out of the basement, so much so that none of them even thought about it anymore. They would go down there and Maya and Lucas both would know that their daughter would be as happy as any girl her age should hope to be, and the same would go for her best (on the way to girl) friend.

The weekend breezed by as fast as it always did, until it came that Maya, Lucas, and the rest of the Friar household woke up on Monday morning, the day where Mrs. Friar would resume her post in her art class at the middle school. It had not been a struggle to fall back into that schedule for the morning, not with the kids to look after. And as nervous as she was about the actual return, more than anything, she was really so happy to get back out there. She had missed them all, her students, her colleagues, everyone… She couldn't say whether it was the nervousness or the excitement that her own children were catering to that day, but when she and Lucas went down to the kitchen after carrying down the twins, they found the older four of their six already working away to put together breakfast for them all, including their great grandparents who would eventually make their way out from the little house behind theirs.

"You guys are all getting so good at this," Lucas complimented the children as Maya nodded and smiled at them all. Under their big sister's supervision, they could be trusted to operate certain things in the kitchen, and it was amazing to look at them go sometimes, to see how well they understood their limitations. They'd try and surpass these every now and then, because of course they would, but their breakfast game that day was very strong, and it was just the way that the morning needed to start, sending Maya off on her grand return to the middle school. She could have packed them all up and brought them with her that day for how happy they made her.

She might not have had them with her in body, but she certainly had them in spirit, and if that wasn't enough, she had them in art. Before she'd known to stop them, they had all gone and drawn their own versions of a smiley face on her inner arm, just past her watch, and she could see them all there now and be brought to smile for it. She had half a mind to get those marks made permanent on her skin, right down to those sorts of squiggles that had been made by Ava assisting the twins to leave their own marks.

Everyone who saw her come along that morning, before the start of classes, reacted with so much happiness that Maya would feel more and more of her nerves leave her body, but at the same time she would be reminded of something all too obvious, the more people she ran into, the more students. They didn't know. And even though a part of her felt glad for not having to subject them to the truth, for the most part she was left uneasy. She didn't like pretending. To her, it not only felt dishonest, whether or not anyone was owed the truth, but it also felt as though her Sara could or should be something kept in the dark, like some dirty secret.

They hadn't known she was there to begin with, not even those who knew her outside the school. Cade Foster had been the first of them to know, and he'd had to find out in the worst possible way. The boy had been out there, all this time, showing concern for her that was really the first she'd gotten of his genuine self, and he was one of those few who spotted her that morning whose eyes showed more than gladness for her return.

She didn't know exactly what she'd do until she stood in her classroom, with her Morning Makers. They were all so curious to know why she'd been away, so glad to know that whatever had taken her away from them was now firmly in the past, which meant that she was okay. She was okay, though to what level was hard to define, and she didn't want to have to tiptoe around it all. So, she explained it to them, setting herself up to then have to do the same with her Class Creatives at next period, and then her Mindscapes and Polychromatics at the latter end of the day. She told them about the pregnancy she'd been setting to reveal to them and to her family and friends and how it had been lost, which had led to her going on leave.

As she'd known would be the case, the news hit them all hard, and there was little to be done for the rest of the period except some quiet work, some low talking in clusters here and there, and the same would happen with each subsequent group. The part that mattered most was that they all seemed to understand the trust she had extended to each and everyone of them that day, and they did not take it lightly. They cared for her, they were so happy to have her back, and now they knew why she'd been away… There were questions on many of their faces, and maybe in time she would answer those, but for today she was only content to be back with them, making art with them. There would be time for the rest, with days, weeks, and months left to this school year.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners