Of Smoke and Dust 🖋

Chapter Seventeen: a nightmare, a remembrance, and renata's little games

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Present

June 6th 2021

1:30 AM

When Maia sleeps, she dreams of shadowy things.

It starts with Leonie, out on the swings of a child's playground, kicking her legs into the air. The sun is shining. Leonie's laughing.

Her cheeks are rosy, red, and alive.

Then another girl enters: dark-haired and blue-eyed, at first Maia thinks she is herself. But that doesn't make any sense, because Maia is here, watching from the trees, so how can she be there too?

Leonie slows to stop, dragging her heels on the ground so that she's close enough to launch off the swing and at the other girl. "Hello!" She cheers, beaming, encircling one arm around the dark-haired girl's shoulders as soon as she's regained her footing.

The girl who isn't Maia smiles back. "Hey, Lee." She says sweetly - cheerfully, even. "How are you?"

"Good." Leonie's response is quick and bland. She seems almost accusing, now, and Maia's eyebrows furrow in confusion. "Where have you been?" She demands.

"Swimming." Replies the girl. Something isn't right - Maia can tell by the way her stomach's sinking - but she doesn't know what.

"I've been waiting." Leonie informs the girl. "You shouldn't have stayed away so long. We've missed you."

"And I, you." The girl says with an easy smile. "But I'm back now, aren't I?"

"Yes." Dream-Leonie hesitates, unsure of herself in a way real Leonie never has been. "You won't leave, will you?" She asks, sounding desperately vulnerable, and Maia's heart clenches.

Because why doesn't Leonie ever look at her like that - like she's just as equally a part of their friendship? Is Maia not important enough? Not good enough?

("She looks just like her!" Six-year-old Maia listened to her mother sob through the paper-thin wall separating her and her parents's bedroom, confused and frightened. "Just like her!"

"Shhh." Her father murmured soothingly. "Shhhh. I know. It's all right, Nora. It's all right."

"It isn't! Her birthday would have been today, and - and I can't-" There was another fresh wave of sobbing. Maia leaned away unconsciously, but it didn't muffle a thing. "Our little girl!"

Her mother's never called Maia her little girl. Her father's never comforted her the way he comforted her mother now.

Maia was only six. She didn't understand what she's done wrong.)

"'Course not." The girl (and Maia's pretty sure she knows who it is, now, but she doesn't want to admit it) says comfortingly. "We're best friends."

And Maia waits for Leonie to deny it, to say you aren't or even just get that look on her face that says I'm only not arguing because I don't want to be rude, but she doesn't. Instead, she nods assent. "You are." She tells the Maia-doppelganger without a trace of deception, and it's somehow more crushing than anything Maia's heard so far.

"For always." The girl says, and she pulls away slightly - only enough so that she can gesture at the sky, which has suddenly become cloudy in the way things often do in dreams (without much sense involved).

The girl frowns. "We should head back before it rains." 

Leonie frowns, too. "Darn it. Where'd the sun go?"