Ah well, her moment's hesitation was quickly shown the door at the look on his face, intrigued rather than weirded out. If he'd been weirded out she woulda stopped, but she was on just a little bit of a roll, and his vibes felt good and encouraging.
“'Kay so, that's what building codes basically are; they're statements of love. Cuz that is love, right, making something that’s gonna be around for good, that’s gonna be safe and sturdy and ain’t gonna rot from the inside cuz you were cutting corners and now the rains are getting in. A code is… is heaps of people putting their experience together to put something down saying ‘we know if you fit things together in this exact way it’s gonna be good, ‘gainst floods and weather and every natural, man-made disaster the world is gonna throw at you’. Saying something’s up to code, it’s like saying, I made you this, and you can trust it. And then people don't haveta live their lives worrying ‘bout a load bearing wall just deciding not to bear the load anymore, y’know? Stuff between people, like, relationships and that? Exactly the same thing.”
Yeah, she thought. Yeah, that came out alright. Little bit messy, but she'd had to do some quick editing in her head as the words made their way out.
The comparison had been knocking around in her head for a few days now, and actually it hadn’t started life as a philosophy at all; it’d started life as a song. The first chords of it humming into life on the bus to Avery’s after she’d had coffee with Erato, not catchy so much as promising. The next day had given her more windows to wash and more time to mull everything over in hot anticipation, words like glorious and girlfriend setting up permanent camps in her head, brewing around their warm campfires ideas of standing up against shitty parents and sharing secret thoughts in childhood bedrooms and finding ways to make things better for him. When she’d finally got home, she’d settled down on her bed with her guitar in her lap and figured out if it all sounded as good to her ears as it did in her imagination.
She’d told Erato she improvised music, sometimes, but pinning down the shape of a song wasn’t straightforward, and committing to starting and then (harder!) finishing a song took a lot, in both time and in perfectionism, two things Lyra didn’t have much of. But she was in the mood to try, with this one.
What emerged was something that was never going to see the light of day. Not because it was bad – in fact she liked the sound of it so much it was hard to leave it alone, and she’d recorded herself on her phone and lain on her back and listened to it and thought wow, yeah, okay in a way that gave her shivers, that made her genuinely impressed with herself. No, it was staying away from audiences because holy shit, was it personal.
And summarizing it out loud while sitting in a workshop on a winter day with an immortal outlaw friend-of-her-dads who’d just said they might be on the same wavelength was one thing, but she’d only given Will the bare bones of it. To sing it would be to admit that she wanted something bad enough that she’d taken the time to put it to music and then performing it would be baring her soul. Like… here, here’s what I want. No, here’s what I need. More telling still, here’s what I’m afraid of. It’d strip her naked. Talk about the mortifying ordeal of being known.
And sure, Lyra wanted people round her to see her, to know her, which is why she was telling Will now. It was a want that stemmed from the same place as the need to tell Rosario what happened to her, the need to tell her family who she was, and why it meant so much when Avery said he wanted to date her cuz you kinda get me hit real hard when the I-get-you-and-you-get-me connection was everything...
But like, but there were limits to how emotionally naked she was gonna get round anyone, so the song was gonna stay firmly private in her head (and her phone) while she let the gist of it inform conversations with immortal outlaw potential bosses who thought they might have something in common with her.