WHO: Lyra and Rosario (feat. other Ortiz's?) WHEN: Backdated to Tuesday 18 May, after dinner WHERE: On a rooftop in Bushwick WHAT: Homecoming WARNINGS: Unlikely
Maybe the weirdest part of everything was the lack of weirdness when Lyra arrived home.
On the night she returned to the city, Johnny and Elaine dropped her off on the street outside her block of flats. He'd offered to come in incase she needed help explaining anything. Lyra said thanks but no, her showing up with a strange man (and a frankly stranger woman) in tow would only make things harder to explain and anyway she didn't trust her mom around someone with tree trunk arms like him.
"I'm gonna tell them I got a job on a riverboat," she decided, as they crossed the Hudson and Bushwick drew closer and closer. "And that I got my hands all... caught in a net." They felt worse than they looked, really. Fingertips were so damned sensitive. It was her chapped and cracked lips that were bugging her the most, now. “They’ll believe I did that,” she said, mostly to herself. “I’m a very spontaneous person.”
They had believed it, too.
Lyra was very weirded out how easily they believed it. Her mom and grandma had both known her apprenticeship had ended months ago. Lyra had flipped back through the calendar in the kitchen and found it written there, in blue ink, Lyra home. Written above it was Tenants assoc AGM and the day after Jemma dentist and the day before Jo book club and the rest of the month was full of other appointments, all written in in Jocelyn’s handwriting.
She’d just disappeared from the calendar for three months. She’d slipped out of the world and slipped out of their minds and the thought prickled her all over in uneasy fear. Lyra put the calendar back onto May and walked away from it.
There must have been some leftover magic, keeping them from realising it. Lyra told herself to be grateful, since she didn’t want her ear chewed off, or Jocelyn’s trust in her ruined, and showing back up after three months of no contact would have earned her both of these things.
She didn’t want to be a missing person, returning home with no logical explanation of where she’d been. Lyra loved attention, but not that kind. Not crazies and conspiracy theories and people who got off messaging women who’d been kidnapped to find out what they’d been through, all sympathetic ears and hard ons. And cops!
Yeah, she could be grateful she didn’t have to deal with any of that.
Even back in her own childhood room, though, her dreams that first night were wild trips. In them, she danced and sang in that ballroom, she spun and laughed. In her dreams, hands pulled her close against angular bodies, and her own hands ran over silks and velvets and fur and warm bare skin one moment, but were shredded to the bone on her guitar strings the next. A tall lord whose name she couldn’t remember leaned in close and pressed his mouth against hers and it was so intoxicatingly delicious.
She’d woken with a gasp so violent it had split her cracked lip open again, and even now, as she walked up and down the wine aisle searching for the most affordable Riesling, she couldn’t stop pressing her tongue against the split. It bothered her that she wasn’t completely sure how she’d got it – dehydration? Singing for hours? Or were those fierce kisses in her dreams a reality? And why couldn’t she remember his name, even when she was awake – Rapscallion? Things were slipping away and she didn’t know if she wanted this or not.
Lyra bought two bottles of the cheapest wine she could find, choosing quantity over quality, and walked them back to her building, the glass clinking happily in her backpack. The streets were as crowded as a packed ballroom or – the ballroom had been as crowded at a New York street? Lyra pondered if this was a useful distinction as she rode the elevator up, but pushed the unsolvable thoughts aside as she walked toward the door to Rosario’s apartment.
She’d walked this floor hundreds and hundreds of times in her life, thousands even! It was so familiar, but she hadn’t been outside this door for over a year and the wallop of nostalgia hit hard. Even without the three missing months, she’d never been away from home, and her family, and her best friend, for this long, never in her life.
That old saying swum into her mind as she raised her hand to bang on the Ortiz’s door: you can never go home again.