Takes place during episode twenty-four. If you haven't watched it, some parts of this fic will not make sense at all.

Also, on a totally unrelated note, Maya rocks.

She knew what Kanaletto was doing to her little girl. She knew. And it tore her apart.

She had watched for ten long years through a periscope of blue and white, chin keenly pointed downwards as she gazed to earth and watched her daughter suffer. How many times had she reached out a slender arm as though to cup her chin and stroke it?

It always fell short by a barrier of immeasurable distance.

And her husband…her beloved Don…his actions ripped her open and left her raw and beaten, gasping through the emotional wreckage. She had wanted to be a pilot, to race, to be free…and now she was stuck in the sky or wherever this was and she'd never been so far from home.

A slender weight on her shoulders, gentle pulls at her wind-kept hair…already the angels were at work again, trying to coax her through the golden gates, a fruitless mission that they kept returning to over and over, to no avail. They were not devils; they could not force the young woman through. No, only the individual could move when they were at peace with themselves.

Peace…something that backed away from the woman's heartstrings, plucked and salted to the core by raging guilt. It hurt. It hurt worse than the charring of her flesh when it pulled her tendons apart through the exploding engines, the smoke robbing her of air and throwing the fire through her, not at her, through her. It hurt. And because it hurt, she was here. Here. Now. And utterly helpless.

For years she had wondered why she had crashed and burned, burned her way up to heaven. It wasn't for lack of trying. She had strode up to those glinting gates and thrust her face at the bars, yelling at God or whoever was past there and demanded, cried, begged to know why He had decided to rip apart her family when they should have grown together and been happy. Then, when no answer came, she crawled back to her old position and stared down, down at the path of her little girl, hearing the sigh of the angels and feeling their tug on her collarbone. She would not more.

It was all her fault. She knew it, she believed it. But recently…she knew more. On Oban, she dug deeper into the core, feeling something familiar and menacing concealed within. And there she saw him, witnessed the terrible cruelty in his eyes. Kanelotto. The avatar who refused to die. The avatar who had made her die.

And then she understood. One look in those malicious rubies and she saw that eternal harvest of plotting and replotting, the grand design that had shaped out an elaborate chessboard those wove all their lives together. And she saw exactly what part her little girl inhabited.

Eva. Don. Her. They had been played, used, thrown away. Made to suffer for the sake of an embittered crow with misplaced values. And now Jordan and Aikka, the two boys who guarded the heart of her daughter with a mixture of sorrow and divided loyalties…they would be crushed in a similar fashion. No. She would not allow the cycle of pain to repeat itself. She would not let her daughter die. Not let her struggle and flouter for the sake of some bastard who had hurt them all.

And so for the briefest of moments, Maya evaded the grip of the angels and somehow found her daughter's heart. She stretched out and felt her grip close over and entwine over a pair of gloved hand and hovercyle handles. She felt the blood beat and the flesh sweat, the handlebars creaking in reminisce of a ghost. And she pulled them both back, the ship and her daughter, guiding them up and over, fighting back.

Up, up…down, push the oppressing Kross into the dust. Her little Eva deserved the taste of victory. Aikka knew she deserved it. And the grin on Jordan's face indicated that he knew it too. And so she would grant them their wish. Even though she knew what would happen next. How the plan would unravel. She did it. Because during the race, she had seen the look on those boys faces, seen what others could not see. And she noted how the same creases appeared on their ridged facial muscles as the ones that had marked her husbands forehead so long ago during the interplanetary finals. And so she knew, she knew that her little girl was loved. And that everything would turn out fine. Because those two boys were there. And in Kanaletto's plan he had not even considered Jordan's purpose or how Aikka's loyalty extended beyond the race. He had missed the most vital factors of all. And that was how he would lose.

Eva had her secret weapons. And they weren't even in the form of a star racer or a magic arrow. And when the final moment came…Maya knew her little girl would live and maybe, finally, her husband would start to smile again.

You won't win Kanaletto. You haven't even reached the finish line.

And so she left her daughter's aching heart and grasped the hands of the angels, smiling quietly at them in apology as they led her to those same gates she had avoided for so long. And they smiled and stroked her hair and palms in reassurance, knowing that she finally realised what they had already known; that life would continue and Eva had people beside her, warm, loving people who would set her on the track she had derailed from so long ago.

Mya's head turned from the golden creak of acceptance, her smile full of pained joy at the tear tracks on her daughter face.

You boys take good care of my daughter.

She almost laughed when she heard the same snippet of though echoed from her husband's lips a little time further ahead of now. It was sincere, it was true, it was tear-stained. And their thoughts were united. As husband and wife should be.

Maybe she wasn't as far from home as she'd previously thought.

And so Maya, equipped with her smile and knowledge, finally moved on from that same watchful guard she had inhabited for ten years. And this time, her heartstrings didn't bother her.