Redhawk Caldera If the whole wide world stops spinning

TYSM for the kudos ;.;  I'm YELLING over Eljay telling her first, YELLING

How do you tell someone your entire personality is a lie when you've gotten so used to faking it for so long?  And it wasn't, not really.  Maia enjoyed being upbeat and happy, and she loved bringing joy as opposed to bringing others down.  Today had illustrated, though, that sometimes sharing your own pain broke through someone else's as well in ways you couldn't really predict.  Maybe it wasn't wrong to let herself... occasionally... be 'not okay'.  She'd let Wraen see her uglier moments once or twice, but even her sister likely didn't know the extent to which Maia abused her own self worth.

She didn't want empty compliments, or to ask him to make her feel better than what she was.  She just wanted to feel better, unprompted, no help needed.

He confirmed it but the confusion only cemented that she'd been completely stupid to ask that.  She took a breath.  Sorry.  It's just hard for me to believe.  She settled on gentle honesty, and a watered-down version of the truth.  Similar to him, the conversation previously had worn her out, and she wasn't sure she wanted to dump her entire "mental garbage can" over his head (to put it in your terms, which I LOVED).  You're amazing, and so much that I can't even describe, and I've never really had anyone ever feel that way back.  So it doesn't feel like it can be real, except it is?  A question again, though this time it was rhetorical.  She could feel herself getting emotional as she spoke, which tended to lead to word-vomit.  It was honestly a pretty good callback to one of their first meetings, back when Finley had still been there to watch her crash and burn.

It's just really hard to believe a guy like you would like a girl like me, y'know, like that?  Unless you didn't mean like that, in which case... shoot.  Sorry.  I've just liked you for forever, and I never figured you'd actually love me back, but...

Welp, that was a heck of a slip.  Immediately she shut her mouth, mortified that she'd let that just... come out like that.  She couldn't even think about how to walk it back, because somewhere in all of that mess, her brain had just stopped working. 

Eljay liked her.

WC: 385