Sanctuary

Summary: Over the years, he's increasingly been the one person she can turn to when things become too much. He's become her refuge, her sanctuary.

I don't own the GMW characters. Any mistakes, however, are mine. Hope you enjoy this!

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*Set between Christmas and New Year's, sophomore year

They're fighting, their voices raised so loud that she can hear them through the closed door of her room all the way on the other side of the apartment.

It's infinitely worse than anything she remembers hearing as a child, somehow even worse than the silence and the muffled sobs of her mother crying in her bedroom after her father had left them.

She doesn't know what they're fighting about. She doesn't want to know. She can barely think past the growing ball of anxiety in the pit of her stomach that seems to be taking over her body and mind.

It's too much. She can't stay in the apartment anymore - doesn't want to be there when her stepfather leaves and won't come back. So she flings down the sketchbook she's been doodling in - her quick, rough sketch of horses galloping across an idyllic field covered by dark, deeply etched, jagged slashes of pencil marks - grabs her coat and a scarf to shield against the biting cold, and climbs out of her window.

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Lucas thinks he imagined it when he hears a knock on his window. It's nearly midnight, snowing, and bitterly cold outside; no one in their right mind would be wandering about outdoors. But he gets up from his bed and checks anyway, and has a moment of panic when he sees Maya on his fire escape outside.

"Maya, what's wrong? What are you doing here?" His tone is urgent as he opens the window and steps back to let her in.

Maya shrugs. "Nothing's wrong," she says, as he bolts the window shut against the cold again. She takes off her scarf and coat, and dumps them over the back of his chair. "I was getting bored, so I came to see what you were doing."

It's usually Lucas who goes to Maya's window, especially this late at night. It's something he's done all too frequently these past few months. He hasn't had a proper night's sleep ever since his parents' divorce, but Maya has helped ease the confusion and pain (and the nagging doubt that maybe, somehow, he's the reason they decided to separate, that's he's responsible for his mother crying herself to sleep every night for weeks after it happened). Maya's the only one he's been able to talk to about it; he hasn't even told Zay much beyond the fact that his parents aren't together anymore.

It's strange how emotional upheaval in his life has brought her back to him, that she was the one he turned to when it felt like he was barely keeping his sanity. It's the only good thing that's come out of the divorce. Nearly a year after the ski lodge trip and his break up with Riley soon after, he and Maya are close friends once again, closer even than before, in fact.

That's how he knows she's not telling the truth, that something isn't right.