WHO: Lyra and Avery WHEN: August, September, October, November, and Wednesday the 28th of December WHERE: NYC WHAT: Your girl's been busy WARNINGS: Nope
While Rosario was engulfed bodily by her clinical rounds, and Avery had been swallowed up by his new job, Lyra was keeping just as busy. Her own summer was hot, muggy, stifling, and totally packed, if a little light on the professional aspirations that were ruling the lives of best friend and husband.
They were both pouring a heap of themselves into their own careers but hell, no one could say she weren’t working hard. Not that she was super keen on calling window washing a career in the same way Rosario had medicine and Aves had journalism, but… least she didn’t havta work in the Taco Bell kitchens anymore. That was surely a step in the right direction. Will’s workshop – that was a step in a better direction, though when it came to working through summer, both workshop and windows needed more protective clothing than it was comfortable to wear.
Each and every paycheck, that summer, she goddamned earned. And when she wasn’t sweating it out in overalls, your girl was spending her time in the shortest of shorts and thin tops held together at the back with nothing but a scrap of fabric and the love of summer. Even then, she pretty much always had something on the go.
The toolkit – her fancy-ass, beautifully stocked, Vegas-money toolkit – was saving her ass from the heat through summer, but mostly it was saving her ass financially. Ain’t no way she’d be able to pay for trapeze without it, cuz she’d made a deal with herself (okay, and with Avery) that she wasn’t gonna spend any money from real jobs on trapeze. Actual paychecks went toward the boring lifeblood of existence; rent and food and bills, and if there was any leftover from that (there usually wasn’t much – but she tried, tried to keep up with Avery, who was so much better at it than her) then that had to go into their savings. If they were gonna have a future not packed into this apartment one day, then that had to go into savings. It was just… future was hard to conceptualize. And like, did future Lyra really need that last $10 more than the woman collecting for the kids cancer foundation out on the street? Probably not, right?
She’d put aside more since they opened that joint account than she’d put away pretty much ever before, it just didn’t look like much, comparatively. But she did try save, forreal, she was trying.
She was just, tryna have fun with her life too. Every spare cent earned from her deal with Nat, Lena and Chloe at Loose Threads all went toward trapeze. First she’d just started off being the microwave necromancer, coming by when she was summoned by whatever mostly-broken or almost-dead item had been dumped on their front step, but it wasn’t all that long before she started hunting things out in the shadowy corners of their storeroom, and as Will honed her skills she started branching deeper into the furniture realm. Cuz look, that patio chair sitting in the corner wasn’t technically broken, but since they were all outta dead electronics, then if Nat trusted her (she smiled, with every warm bit of her charm and cheek) she could take it home for free and bring it back in a week or so, bring it back better and maybe she could keep whatever markup they felt was fair?
And okay, so if she did the math on the time she spent flipping that first chair, she only woulda earned a couple bucks an hour, but that’s why Lyra didn’t do the math. The chair looked fantastic when she was done, that was the takeaway, and the money she got from the sale a couple weeks later was still money she wouldn’t’ve had otherwise. Besides, she’d had fun fiddling with the chair in the corner of the living room, it gave her something to do when Avery was working late. Gave her something to do she was proud of.
More than half the time, when Lyra returned to Loose Threads with something she’d flipped, there'd be something else waiting, something broken but savable, beautiful or interestingly ugly under chipped wood and layers of dust, and something that would sell after a bit of work. Though she’d promised that she’d get rid of anything that either couldn’t be fixed or wouldn’t sell, she hadn’t yet had to keep that promise. It was like some power in the world wanted her to keep with trapeze.
Well, she was a power in the world who wanted to keep with trapeze, but it was immensely gratifying that the universe thought it was a good idea too, even if it meant that Avery and Armaan were gonna haveta spend the next fortnight stepping awkwardly around an end table that wasn't quite small enough to fit comfortably in their apartment without becoming a menace to shins everywhere. She was gonna do great things with this table though, and she was gonna ask Will to teach her a few more nifty tricks, and if she got what she thought it was worth she could even spend some of the profits on getting him something nice for his baby.
Lyra was pretty proud of how the whole money thing was working out actually, though some weeks it was a precarious balancing act, and she wasn’t so sure Avery totally agreed ‘bout any of her financial choices, but there was still more money flowing round their shared apartment than there was when they lived apart, so was there really anything to complain about?
Aside from the heat, they could complain 'bout that; but that was another place where the toolkit came in useful. It was a brutal day in early August that Lyra spent the whole afternoon sweating and swearing over the boxy air conditioning unit in their apartment, coaxing and wheedling and finally bullying it into blasting out air a few degrees colder than it had been. Soon, the boys were gonna come home and say things like “awesome” or “oh thank fuck” or maybe “how’d you do that?” even though they wouldn’t understand when she told them, and Lyra was gonna get to drink the cold wine from the fridge and sit on her husband’s lap as they watched TV, cuz the air conditioning was blowing cold enough that sitting on him wasn’t going to make both of them overheat.
Actually – screw wine, she was gonna make up some cocktails. Something proper tropical, with a can of pineapple and the end of the rum. She was gonna dig through the cupboards and make something awesome for the boys to come home too. Maybe she’d even cook, something she didn’t do very often at all. But she could when the mood took her. She could tap into her granddaddies heritage and pull together some jerk chicken, show Armaan he wasn’t the only one who could make things spicy (cooking, always more appealing if it involved some kinda showing off). She was gonna play loud summer music and cook something to share and they could come home to a cool apartment and dinner ready and their lives would be infinitely improved by all of it and wasn’t that proper saint’s-daughterly of her?
It sure was. And doing things like this – keeping busy busy busy like this – sure did help her ignore the things going on in her head and her life that didn’t make her feel like a very good saint’s daughter.
See there was the whole thing with Jem – and well, with Jemma – that was just a bit…
A couple weeks before, Jem had stranded Jemma with her, outta the blue, no pre-arrangement, nada. Lyra liked hanging out with her sister, suuure, but Jemma wasn’t supposed to be her responsibility.
That day, she’d been so pissed at her mom, but she’d been pissed at Jocelyn too, cuz why hadn’t Jocelyn been round to catch Jemma when Jem dropped her? So, that afternoon at Patrick’s when Jocelyn had called, and then texted, to see if Lyra had rescued Jemma, Lyra hadn’t picked up straight away; Lyra’d pretended she hadn’t seen the text.
She hadn’t left her grandma unread for long. Not like a cruel amount of time or anything, just long enough for Lyra to feel like she’d made some sort of point. Maybe it was petty (it was hella petty) punishing Jocelyn with worry when it was Jem that Lyra was mad at, but also Lyra couldn’t help thinking that if Jocelyn didn’t want to worry about Jemma then Jocelyn shouldn’tve blocked Jem’s number, Jocelyn shoulda been there to pick Jemma up. It wasn’t very saint’s-daughterly of her, and it wasn’t who she wanted to be, but she was mad about missing work and scared about what she was gonna haveta miss in the future, and sometimes fears like that just got the better of you, y’know?
That thought— that fear— didn’t leave her head, no matter how much broken shit she fixed.
She hadn’t told Avery ‘bout this thing weighing on her, or Rosario even, but she’d had the conversation with herself playing all the parts lotsa times. Why are you worrying about something that might not happen? imaginary Avery asked, and even in her head Lyra struggled to articulate her reasons beyond she left me, for sure she gonna leave Jemma as well. She didn’t wanna be a responsible backup-parent figure. And maybe that was shitty of her, but... she just didn’t wanna be that girl. She didn’t wanna fit the care of her little sister into her life, and she didn’t wanna address how selfish this made her feel. She definitely wasn’t proud of that feeling, and cuz she wasn’t proud of it, it stuck around, getting up in her businesses and clinging to – highlighting – anything else she did that made her feel selfish.
And that totally ruined the pride she shoulda been feeling about sorting out the AC, cuz admittedly there was a strong selfish streak to what she was doing. On days she and Avery were both home after dinner (tonight!) she wanted to be able to keep spooning on the couch while they watched TV, or leaning against him with his arm slung around her shoulders, or either of them making use of the other’s lap as a pillow, which had been a great way to spend winter and the icy bits of early spring but was pretty slick and sweaty in high summer, (the head on lap thing was still doable in the heat – hold still, she'd challenge him, balancing her cold beer on his forehead and taking her hands off it, trying not to laugh at his attempt not to let it spill all over his face, but it wasn't spooning, curled right into each other, and days were just better if they included an hour or two of just being held, yknow?)
She needed that contact, that actual physical grip. And it wasn’t just cuz she loved him, or maybe it was cuz she loved him and that was why he had the power to vanquish… well… see… there was still a lil part of her that wasn't over the dragon.
The dragon. Though forreal, dragon had become shorthand for everything else she didn’t know how to process.
It all still twisted her mind. Thinking about Rathellion vanishing down the maw of a dragon, how was a girl supposeda process that? And see, another part of her was still freaked about how she'd wanted to see him again, wanted to follow that pull regardless of things like sense and self preservation, and as huffy as she’d been when Avery compared her to a drug addict, with a little distance from that conversation she could admit that maybe he was a bit right. And the thought of having addictive tendencies that’d lead her into danger, well, that dumbass thought hooked right back into how she still wasn't totally over the fact she nearly killed herself a few months ago, just partied herself to the brink of death… and sometimes whatever was on TV wasn't interesting enough to distract her from all those not-so-little thoughts, but with the arm of a husband who'd promised to love her wrapped round her stomach (or under her shirt if Armaan wasn’t home, or down her shorts) that was enough to chase off any thought she didn’t wanna be thinking. Her Aves; dragon fighter.
And even if she didn’t need him to distract her, she still really liked being able to feel when Avery was holding his breath if they were watching something tense. Liked feeling the puff of air on her skin when he snorted when something stupid happened, liked the shake of his laugh. You couldn’t be that close if it was a million degrees inside, so hot that the touch of someone else’s skin provoked an ugh, don’t touch me instead of anything better.
So yeah, fixing the AC was selfish too, but at least the boys would be happy about it. Lyra sat back on her bare heels and wiped her forehead with the back of a hand, smiled at the unit in self-satisfaction, then hauled herself up to see what to do about dinner.
On one of the last, long, dog days of summer, on a restless evening when Armaan was wooing his new boy at home, Lyra took Avery up to Evergreens Cemetery. A little light clung to the sky in the west, a half moon somewhere up there too, barely a breeze in the hot, muggy air. There was nothing special about the date, no eclipse or solstice, no alignment of stars, no anniversary, and enough time had passed that one entire summer had burned off the immediacy of whatever had happened here in May, though not all the… the remnants. Lyra still had the feeling that coming back here might end up being a very stupid idea, but that day, both home from long and not-awesome days at work, she and Avery had been kinda snippy at each other, a lil too in each other’s space, and Lyra got the feeling it woulda been a stupider idea not to do something to break them out outta that headspace so… she suggested this, risks be damned, and now here they were, with more than two hundred acres of space instead of a few hundred square feet, hoping luck was on her side.
And if it wasn’t, if something did happen to them tonight, well – he’d asked her, will you take me with you?, he’d asked for that, so if something did happen, least things’d be back to Avery and Lyra against the world, and that was when they were strongest. Nights like this, when home felt too small and something ‘bout the two of them in ordinary life just wasn’t clicking, they could use a lil more strength.
(Nothing did happen in the end; nothing dramatic anyway, but a little before midnight, as they passed through the shadows between two mausoleums, part of Avery’s equipment started getting some weird readings. Not holy shit weird but definitely a not nothing weird, and a spikey prickle had run up Lyra’s spine and down her arms, changing in quality when she wove her fingers through his, and feeling more like excitement than fear when he gave her hand a tight, thrilled squeeze. She’d pressed herself close to read the little screen too, though she was paying as much attention to him as to the reader – getting a real kick outta how wide-eyed he was, grinning back at him, feeding excitement back to him. It had to be ghosts, they decided, not faeries, real actual probable ghosts.)
When they got home again a couple hours later, the few hundred feet didn’t seem so small any more, and when he kissed her and there was no space between them at all, that was kinda perfect. Truely, it felt so much better to be focusing on drawing hungry little moans outta him than on the night’s earlier tension, which, under the delicious weight of him, could be cast aside easy as anything.
The world started slipping back toward the dark; longer nights, crisper mornings, way less scheduled window-cleaning jobs when the weather went nuts. Before she knew it, it’d been a whole year since she’d met Avery in that bar, then a year since her worst fight ever with Rosario culminating in Rosario’s traumatic self-discovery on Halloween, a year since she met Patrick and her cousins, a year since her mom rediscovered god-through-Patrick, and not so long now and it would be a year since Vegas, and oh holy shit wasn’t this marriage just the best (and also the longest, shut up) romantic relationship she’d ever had? Every day crept them closer to their party, their One Year and Look How Good We Have it party, and all Lyra needed for a pick-me-up was to close her eyes for a moment and think about that upcoming night.
And she needed a pick-me-up, especially on the days when her mom breezed right through boundaries.
Not that Lyra ever drew a proper line and said, using words: dammit, mom, I'm not a backup you!! She never actually demanded: Stop relying on me to drop everything to catch Jemma - cuz how could she say that out loud? What if Jocelyn had ever told Jem she wouldn't be there to catch Lyra if (when) Jem dropped her - Lyra wouldn't be able to cope, knowing that. Jocelyn had always fought to make Lyra's life better, more stable, more safe. Jocelyn had never rejected her, Lyra couldn't not do the same for Jemma.
She could resent it, though, a bit. Then feel utterly terrible ‘bout the resenting. Bad, bad saints-daughter.
Lucky Jem didn't call her in too often. As summer turned into fall, fall to winter, Jem only fucked up once or twice a month, and Lyra could handle that; could convince herself it wasn't a Thing. Once or twice a month, and every other night of that month Lyra got to have her own life - that was still pretty fucking great.
And cuz it kept happening, each time diluted the worry that this time would be the time Jem wouldn't come home. Cuz, she did keep coming home. She did, every time, and then Lyra got to go home too, and everyone stayed where they were supposed to be and it was alright, it was. Annoying, and draining, and sometimes the timing was really bad, but sometimes Jem was only like, an hour late, and in all, it was something Lyra could live with. Who knew how things’d blow up if she forced a confrontation, huh?
Well - Lyra knew. If she drew hard lines with her mom, if she told Jem she couldn’t keep springing Jem on her with no warning, if she insisted that she needed to live her own life, she could guarantee Jem’s face would crumble. She’d apologise and apologise, she might even cry. And it was messed up, cuz shouldn't Lyra want to be apologised to?
Maybe, but out of everything her mom did, apologising was the most exhausting. It was an onslaught, and who wanted to deal with an onslaught? Not Lyra, no way.
She didn’t address the thought that, if any of her friends’d said the same thing ‘bout their moms, she woulda been all for a confrontation, but like, this was Jem? It was different. More complicated. Too complicated to explain to anyone else (apart from Rosario, who’d grown up with Jem or Jem’s absence same as Lyra had, but Rosario was so busy) so too complicated to try unravel even in her own head. Best to just deal with events as they came, yeah? Go with the flow. Lyra was queen of going with the flow.
She would have only needed to force a confrontation if she still lived at home. If Lyra hadn’t gotten married and moved out, things woulda been way different. Jem’d already been assuming she was a live-in babysitter before she went, that woulda only ramped up. Thinking that, it made anything kinda annoying that Avery did way easier to brush off. So she was the only one who ever noticed that their sheets needed changing, and so what that she ended up doing dishes significantly more often than he did, at least she didn't haveta mother a four year old. (Jocelyn had taught her young, before she started dating, to pay attention to who did the dishes, to who volunteered to do them - it was why the bit of advice she'd given Patrick last Christmas was to volunteer for ‘em before Jocelyn had a chance to ask, though turned out Patrick wasn't the kind who needed telling.) And it wasn’t like any of the domestic stuff outweighed how much she appreciated him in other areas, like how great he was at distracting her when she was on a frustrated rant about her mom, how his presence at family dinners drew conversation away from anything volatile like childcare, like sainthood or god, or like when her next proper job interview was.
Though, not much distracted Jocelyn from asking her granddaughter what she was doing ‘bout the whole career thing.
Well…
She could have a career in carpentry, she really could. Lyra'd found that her work with Will was solid and dependable in a way little in her life had ever been solid and dependable. It lacked the adrenaline of window cleaning – even a year in, she got a kick outta the heights – but it had a permanence her other job lacked. Windows got dirty again, but the things she and Will made together could be passed onto their customer's grandchildren. The scale wasn't all she wanted – something in her still craved to build houses, especially when she was standing smack bang in the middle of the workshop, some part of her craved more - but there was proper satisfaction in the work nonetheless. And Will treated her fair, more than fair, Will offered his centuries of knowledge without patronisation or nothing, and he'd meant what he said 'bout paying her fair too. "You gonna spoil me, when it comes to bosses," she'd told him, a couple paychecks in, when she was still getting her head round the way it was gonna be. "No one gets treated this good in the real world."
But Will insisted; this was the real world. Or here in the workshop, it was the world as it could be. A job without the undercurrent of greed that flowed beneath every other job she'd ever had, a job without power struggles that sprang up constantly between them in charge and the small young woman convinced she knew what she was doing. It relaxed some part of her she didn’t even know could relax, cuz it’d been tense all her working life. She never knew she could learn to love slow.
One day Lyra would like to run a place like this. On a bigger scale than just two, maybe a dozen or so people, like-minded people, putting together places for others to live. What a dream, right? That was still a couple leaps and bounds into the future though; she couldn't start thinking ‘bout leading a crew till she'd actually got some proper construction experience under her toolbelt.
And she had applied for permanent jobs. She had. She’d even got to interview for several of them, though there at that last hurdle was when other, more experienced candidates usually bet her out. A week before Christmas, though, she’d been offered a job. Full time, decent money, plenty of variety, only…
Only, at the end of the interview, which had gone pretty okay, not great cuz Lyra couldn't get comfortable, he'd been casually asking her a few questions about herself culminating in a nod toward her ring and a "you actually married, or that to deliberately mess with my head?" and suddenly she understood why she hadn’t been able to get comfortable with him. "Actually married," she'd said coldly, trying to make it a warning of her own, but he wouldn't even conceive of listening to a warning from her.
"Happily?" he'd asked, instead. So she turned that job offer down flat.
And uuugh, maybe she shouldn't let creeps like that that talk her out of a job she really wanted. Surely she could handle it, like she handled working with don't-come-back-till-you-got-a-negative-pregnancy-test Jake, maybe she could put up with Happily? for the paycheck and a chance to get the experience other jobs want before they accepted her…
Or maybe the creep was just the excuse she was using so she could stick with life as she knew it.
See, they woulda made her work Wednesday nights.
Lyra could go to trapeze on other nights, technically. But Wednesday was when Viviane went, Viv who was so beautiful it woulda hurt to look at her if she hadn’t also been one of the warmest and most joyous and fun people Lyra'd ever met. Vivacious, vivid Viviane opened Lyra’s life up to parties she never dreamed of, and Viv more than anyone else encouraged her to carry on with trapeze for the sheer beauty of it.
Wednesday was when Soledad went, Soledad who was equal parts self-composed and sarcastic as fuck, who was cool in an unfazeable kinda way, maybe a little mysterious in a still waters run deep but she knew every dark shadow in her own pool kind of way, and unlikely as it was that Lyra would ever achieve that style of cool, part of her couldn't help but aspire to it. Though Lyra ran a good game of acting like she was above caring what people thought about her, and ain’t no way she was gonna let other people's opinions of her actually stop her doing anything, Lyra was still aware, and sometimes that awareness demanded more attention than others. Lyra very much wanted Soledad to think she was cool.
Wednesday was when Mackenzie went, Mackenzie who Lyra vibed hardest with, despite her god-you’re-gorgeous crush on Viv and her god-you’re-cool crush on Soledad. Mackenzie was earthier, veering on crunchy, easy to be round, and an endless supply of quality edibles. She lived with her grandparents and siblings packed in an apartment in Bed-Stuy and let Lyra borrow her granddaddies pickup truck if there was some bit of furniture she couldn't move on her own and Rosario's dad's car was too hard to get to (not that dad, her OG one).
Wednesday was when Pol went to trapeze, and Lyra was too invested in the saga of Pol's kids and Pol's ongoing battle with the gender-normative Karens at their kids preschool to give up on the latest weekly installment. Wednesday was when Fern went, and Fern was just so freaking weird and vague, Lyra could never predict what was gonna come out of her mouth. Wednesdays were the best nights. How could Lyra sacrifice them for a chance to work for a creep, even if it was doing something she might love? She loved this instead. She loved the rest of her life. The mess of all the moving pieces, the way the mess all fit together somehow.
She just, uh, failed to mention to Jocelyn she’d turned that job offer down, and when Avery asked, she was honest 'bout turning it down, but maybe she played up the creep factor a bit. Not working for a slimy boss was a legit reason to turn a job down, after all! It was just… maybe no one else needed to know she’d picked trapeze nights over career. Maybe that was a thing that could stay inside her own head.
It wasn’t just the actual trapeze sessions, either, it was the parties afterward she loved. Not always parties - sometimes it was as tame as late night coffee (never actually tame - they’d sit in a tight little knot and talk and laugh for hours putting the world to rights.) Other nights, she and her Wednesday crew hit up nightclubs in the Bronx and block parties in Queens, they did roller discos and karaoke and rooftop bar hopping - all wired up on endorphins from hurling themselves through the air, they went where the night took them. It wasn't every Wednesday, some days lives just didn't line up for it, some Wednesdays she went home straight after class and Avery got the brunt of her fired up endorphins instead, but either way it went, Thursday mornings, without fail, were a bitch.
And poor Avery. His work hours were brutal when it came to mornings, and that was the worst time of day for him. She felt so bad watching him drag himself outta their bed, all monosyllabic if not downright grunty, so tried to make it better; way back when he first got this job she’d started getting up with him instead of succumbing to the coziness of rolling over and going back to sleep. Least she could do, right? It’d been a while since they went up against something together, Lyra and Avery VS the world, so she figured, this was kinda like that? Horrible morning comradery. She hadn’t had to face down any terrible family members for him lately but she could get up with him and make him coffee, try make his morning a lil brighter.
Unless she had her period, and then all bets were off, and if anything, he could make her coffee. Or, to be honest, on Thursdays; Thursdays he was on his own. But! But heaps of the time she still hauled ass outta bed when he did. At least half the time anyway. Horrible morning comradery wasn’t nearly as thrilling as taking on a common enemy, and things that weren’t thrilling were just a bit… unsustainable.
The Wednesday that was wedged between Christmas and New Years, the crew had shrunk to Viviane and Soledad and Mackenzie, and Viviane had led them into an underground club that was entirely dedicated to the aesthetic of the 1920s, and there’d been cocktails (Viv’s shout; Lyra was all outta money after Christmas) and dancing and Lyra woulda been very, very late home if a brownout hadn’t swept through the neighbourhood and kicked them all out. Shivering out on the street, Soledad declared that - since it was about to fucking hail - she was going home to bed, and alright, alright, they’d continue this party in the new year when it was less likely to freeze anyone alive.
It was still after midnight when Lyra got home (beating the hail by moments; she laughed victoriously as ice threw itself against the door she’d just managed to close) and rode that lucky high up the elevator. If she was really lucky (she thought at the universe, on her way up) then Avery would still be awake - no, no if she was really lucky, he wouldn’t have to work in the morning and they could spend it listening to the winter storm from the warmth of bed (she couldn’t remember what his schedule was, if Christmas and that had messed it all up) so if the universe could just like, sort that out for her, that’d be super great??
Inside, she kicked off her boots, and shed her Vegas coat over the sewing machine that hadn’t seen a whole lotta action since flipping furniture had become more interesting. The coat became a dark, shaggy lump in the corner, and Lyra grinned and saluted it, her faithful party companion, then set her mind to husband-hunting, aiming at that sliver of light peeking out beneath their bedroom door.