WHO: Lyra and Rosario WHEN: Sunday night WHERE: Evergreens cemetery WHAT: Demigods in a cemetery during an eclipse WARNINGS: TBD
Lyra’s in a fantastic mood tonight. Fantastic in the sense that life’s a little like a fantasy – the air’s warm, she looks great, she’s gonna spend the night in a cemetery watching the moon turn red and it’s gonna be freaky and fun and Rosario’s gonna be there, grounding it all to science and eating donuts and drinking wine and using Lyra like a pillow as she looks up at the sky away from pressures of school and family and fathers. Since Lyra moved out, they’ve hung out just the two of them whenever they could manage it, but compared to how it used to be, Rosario-and-Lyra time is a rarity.
And sure, not everything tonight's perfect. There’s a little background dread at what Jocelyn's gonna go through if she finds out about the faeries, but after that first night of uneasiness, it’s been overtaken in Lyra’s mind. Eaten up by the fascination about why this might be happening.
About what else might happen… Especially on a blood moon cemetery kinda night. Super flower blood moon— it sounds like an anime.
Lyra fidgets on the bus on her way up to Bushwick, one foot on her thigh so she can fiddle with her laces. She loves these boots; Jocelyn found ‘em last week, one of the things she missed taking with her when she left home. Op shop ankle boots, worn and soft, cracked around the bend in her foot, they're making her ridiculously happy, like a little bit of home she can stomp around in. Under them, she's in sheer tights, dark red for the blood moon, ripped stylishly ragged beneath denim shorts— same deal with the shorts, ragged around the edges, embroidered with clover over the pockets. And she’s got her coat, her huge, Vegas, fuzzy coat, so her shadow under the streetlights makes her look like a distorted dandelion, all puffed up on long skinny legs. Well, streetlights and shadows make her legs look longer than they are. Make her look funny all over. Lyra spent the block between apartment and bus stop playing with her shadow self, turning her coat into a triangle to make her shadow an arrow, twisting and turning to make girl shaped monsters, flattening her hands and catching the light just right so her shadow hands look freakishly extended, like she’s carrying dinner trays. It all works real good with the music in her ears.
On the bus, she sits backward and stretches her legs out in such a way it makes people look. She pokes her fingers into one of the holes and tugs it wider (for the aesthetic, but it fulfills her need to fidget too) and catches the eye of a businessman across the aisle as she does, and looks at him with a challenge and a grin in her eye for a moment, before he glances at her leg again and then back at his phone. It’s not a want me thing, she’s not after lust or a flirt or anything like that, it’s just…
She wants something to happen. She expects something to happen. Nearly two months ago she almost died and it made her burrow into where it was safe, for a while, it made her feel small and scared and beatable and so, so sick, but every day that passes things warm up. There’s more flowers, more growth, it’s warm enough on nights like this to run around in shorts, she’s got a wicked trapeze showcase coming up and she’s doing it, she’s committing to more classes, even though it’ll mean not saving any money for a while (but Paulie’s son’s hooking her up with a couple weeks of work pouring concrete, money’ll be alright) because classes aren’t just the perfect combo of fun and hard work, they also mean more spontaneous parties, and Lyra wants the kind of life that’s full of spontaneous parties.
She wants things that make her feel alive, in every cell of her body. Parties, yep, mysteries, yep, giving lip to actual Krampus, yep, that’d definitely done it.
Going to watch the eclipse with her best friend counts as the same kinda thing. The air’s all crackling with possibilities and the streets around Evergreens are so, so familiar, they feel like they belong to her. She leaps off the bus and onto the pavement, jumping over mysterious puddles (it hasn’t been raining) and runs again, purely because of the way it makes her coat puff out behind her, and she wishes she had roller skates to go faster, and she runs past a dozen e-scooters and wants to glide through the streets on one of those but there’s $23.06 left in her account this month and none of that’s reserved for scooters, so she just runs. Her veins flow with blood she doesn’t understand and so do Rosario’s and soon they’ll be together, in one of the darkest spots in the city to watch the moon go red, and Lyra climbs up onto the gates because, small miracle, she’s here first, and the gate feels like it belongs to her too, so of course she's mounting it.
Something might happen. The hip flask only promotes the feeling— not that Lyra’s drunk. She spins it open and has a sip while she’s waiting, straddling the iron gate and leaning back and forward, making it sway against its chains, forcing her body to balance against the possibility of falling. It’s not straight vodka, there’s juice in the flask too, but it's strong enough to taste, and the taste of it goes so well with the warm wind and the orange streetlights and her music turned all the way up because no one’s gonna sneak up on her while she sitting on top of a gate. She got that surveillance thing going on, up here, and while she watches out for anyone coming, she can really get in to her music. She’s feeling Halsey’s Hurricane in the same way she’s really feeling everything tonight, swaying on the gate and singing don’t belong to no city, don’t belong to no man even though she’s super into belonging to her men these days (cept, she’s gotta be extra careful not to phrase it that way round Addy – like, they’re alright now, but she don’t wanna say anything that’s gonna get misinterpreted) so like, the song’s a big fat lie, but whatever, there’s something bout the way the music makes her feel that she’s really digging. Like she’s a one woman festival, like she’s the headlining act in her own life.
It’s a good feeling. She’s not dead, after all. She’s alive, she’s young, and she wants something to happen, in the same way she wants something to happen when she deliberately misses her trapeze, the thrill of falling, the always shocking relief of being caught.
Lyra doesn’t know how that translates into the non-trapeze world, or even if it does. It might take an investigation to find out, and if there's one thing Lyra's discovered about herself in this last year, it's that she goddamn loves an investigation.