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“Up your knees and thighs… notice how your clothing sits against your skin, any physical feeling at all, without feeling the need to change anything...”

She can feel her heartbeat slowing down, and the gentle spreading sensation of relaxing into the mattress. Her thighs are a little sore, actually. She’d been tense at lunch for too long, on a hard seat.

“Breathe in and out slowly.”

Knees and thighs? Maelle is ready for hips and lower back. Too fast. She breathes in slowly, exhales slowly. The little pocket where her face is becomes too hot and she turns her head, looking over to Sciel with a frown.

Is this really what she does in her free time? Is this why she's so... relaxed? Must be nice if this works for her, but Maelle wants to roll off the bed and onto the floor.

Even with her eyes closed, Sciel can feel Maelle’s impatience like a miasma. The tension in the other body in the bed creates a hard divot in the mattress that spreads over to her, and she could ignore it, but she chooses not to.

Sciel’s chest rises and falls, evenly.

“I’m glad you’re trying, you know,” she murmurs. “Up into the hips… just think about your body, and leave the mind for later.”

"Think about my body using my mind and ignore my mind? Oh, sure," she says, not really understanding, but she'll take the credit for making the attempt. She closes her eyes. Hips. Yep, they're there. She can feel the waistband of her jeans.

The hip bone's connected to the... lower back bone? Belly? Maelle tries to guess what Sciel will say next.

“Midsection, next,” Sciel says.

She can always feel that one when she listens for it, the subtle tug of the scar roped across her belly, the way it doesn’t stretch quite as much as the rest of her. She never likes it but she doesn’t have to.

“You can let go of tension just by breathing, you know.”

Deep inhale. Deep exhale. It does kind of feel good, but she can still feel that weight, threatening to crush her lungs.

"If it were that easy, wouldn't everyone be free of tension?"

She opens her eyes just a crack, looking at the wild tangle of Maelle’s ponytail.

“So this feels easy to you, then?” Sciel asks, a little cheeky. “It takes time to learn how to sit with discomfort.”

And it’s still not easy then, either. Even with caution, she feels the past few weeks weighing on her, and it’s becoming difficult to keep up with.

"I hear that happens in older people."

Not old, but older! And perhaps she's being purposely obtuse, sighing again and squeezing her eyes shut against the urge to yawn. This is not easy. This is torture. She's uncomfortable and tired and worried and the quiet just makes her feel more wound up.

Her eyes open a little bit more, with that sigh. Maelle being stressed and tense is common, but the energy radiating off her is different. The potential upcoming conversation with Gustave, maybe?

“Is there something you’d rather talk about, instead of doing this,” she asks.

Does she want to talk? Maelle opens her eyes, looking over to Sciel once more. She feels too exposed, and so she rolls onto her back, hands clasped over her stomach.

"I don't know. Maybe? It's probably nothing," she mutters. Again, the urge to check her messages feels like an itch she needs to scratch. She's sure the moment she confesses what's bothering her right now, Verso will send her a stupid text.

“Doesn’t sound like nothing,” she says, shifting up a little and propping herself against the pillows. “What happened?”

Maelle has to tip her head back a little to glance at Sciel, and does so before returning her gaze to the ceiling with a shrug.

"Nothing, really. Verso's just been quiet." A different sort of quiet, and it feels off. But a lot of things have felt off, lately. "Like I said, it's... you know, probably nothing."

“I’ve been having trouble getting in touch, too,” she says, looking down at the top of Maelle’s head. “I thought we’d all have a talk about that tonight, too, when Gustave comes to pick you up.”

"At least it's not just me," Maelle says with yet another sigh. She's been wondering if she did something wrong. Had she been wrong to hug him before the movie? Was she too excited to spend time with him? Had that made him uncomfortable? There's some relief, but now it means Verso is quiet on two fronts.

"Maybe we'll be lucky and he's actually been messaging Gustave all along."

Unlikely.

“I’m not sure if that would relieve me or make me anxious enough to list my body parts for hours,” Sciel says, a self-aware laugh hidden on her breath. She reaches down to run her fingers over Maelle’s ponytail, twirling a lock gently around her fingers. “I think… Verso is just being Verso. Like Monoco has said… he’s prone to running off.”

"Well, now I see why some of my previous foster families returned me to the orphanage after I ran off one too many times," Maelle says dryly, rolling her eyes, but it's not a joke at all.

Sciel sits upright, slowly, enough to be able to comfortably peer down at her.

“Oh, Maelle,” she says, softer. “This doesn’t sound like ‘nothing’ at all.”

"It's just--it's irritating. Like," she shrugs, pointedly not looking at Sciel, as if the disappointment wasn't visible in her eyes without direct eye contact, "Like... I remember what you said, before. About him and family. I like spending time with him and I think he likes spending time with me. Isn't that enough?"

Enough to stay around, enough to be consistent. Enough to move on from some of the past.

Sciel watches her eyes flick away, the stubborn avoidance rippling through her body. She exhales, feeling sadness pulse through her, maybe in a way it needs to.

“In a kinder world, it would be,” Sciel replies. “But it isn’t fair for you to be made to feel that way.”

"I can't name anything that is fair."

It's not just their world. It's here, too. It's something in them, maybe, that invites unfairness.

Sciel has several, but it feels unlikely that Maelle will want to hear positive thoughts right now –– she’d be within her rights to. Sometimes there’s no way to make something better, and all the good things in the world won’t change that this lonely girl sometimes clings to people who aren’t ready to love her as fully as she needs.

Sciel strokes Maelle’s bangs back.

“And he knows that. And it doesn’t stop him from complicating things anyway, sometimes.”

The touch is nice. Gustave has done the same thing, when she's upset for one reason or another.

"Yeah."

A beat, and she shakes her head, sighing.

"Guess I'll just... try to ignore the silence."

“Yes,” she says, hand resting on the top of Maelle’s head. “And when he’s back, you can tear him a new one, if you feel like it. Maybe that’ll feel fair?”

The weight of her hand feels more calming than trying to go over each body part in her mind.

"I don't want to be the one to find out if he can still be cut in two," Maelle says miserably despite how absurd that string of words is. "I just wish... all of this had gone better. Gustave, Verso. He doesn't really have any reason to stick out how--how awkward it is. I'd probably run off somewhere too, if I were him."

“I wish, too,” she says. “But the cards were dealt for this a long time ago. All we can really hope for is that Verso’s better angels win out –– that he wants to be here with all of us, and has cast his lot with Lumière knowing it’s worth the awkwardness. I think it’s a solid bet.”

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