WHO: Lyra and Patrick and family WHEN: Christmas eve then Christmas day WHERE: Lyra's place WHAT: Lyra's first Christmas with two parents WARNINGS: Nah we're probably good here
“I’m so sorry,” Jem said, apropos of nothing while they were wrapping up Jemma’s presents (a handknitted jersey from Jocelyn, a little set of overalls from Lyra with bright patches sewn all over them, similar to a pair Lyra owned that Jemma loved.)
Lyra squashed some sellotape down and looked over at her mom, who was tugging on her braid the same way Lyra fiddled with her curls when she was thinking or nervous or antsy. “Aaabout what?” Lyra prompted, following her mom’s gaze to the coffee table, which was covered in… pretty much everything, tape and paper and books and laundry and empty tea cups and saucers and jammy bits of half-eaten toast (cleaning up was the next job.)
“Being so hard on you about that book,” Jem said, nodding at one particular corner of the table where Lyra’s book on the saints of Ireland was sitting under a couple of out-of-date magazines. “Jemma loves those stories, and you… you were just trying to show us the truth.”
“Uh, okay, thanks,” Lyra looked down at the wrapped jersey, and smoothed the tape down a little firmer with her thumbnail. That hadn’t really been what the saint book was about… she wasn’t trying to share a message, she’d only bought it cuz it was there in the shop on that particular afternoon, cuz it had saints in it, cuz she didn’t know where to start looking for the answers to the giant questionmarks in her life so she panicked and bought a book when she probably shoulda saved her money. Lyra blamed running headlong into the door for that choice; she needed to be more careful with money. Too impulsive that day, like her mom. She’d always been a little impulsive when it came to having literally any disposable income and she knew she had to stop.
“Can you forgive me?” Jem said, and when Lyra raised her head the earnest, worried, longing look on Jem’s face struck her dumb.
Lyra didn’t know when the last time her mom asked for forgiveness was – wasn’t really a subject that came up a lot – but the most memorable time was several years ago when Lyra was sixteen, and fresh outta the hospital her mom hadn’t noticed she needed. It’d probably been the most upsetting phone call of Lyra’s life, Jem (in Mexico) sobbing about how bad she felt and how much she loved her and how she couldn’t live with herself if Lyra didn’t forgive her.
Lyra had (in her own opinion, more or less) long since learned to live with all the feelings she had ‘bout that, but it was still a shock to have them all thrown in her face again like this.
“Yeah, it’s nothing,” Lyra said, wishing it was, wishing Jem would just chirp a ‘thanks baby’ and get on with wrapping Jocelyn’s present before she got outta the bathroom, but the gratitude on Jem’s face said without a doubt that it wasn’t nothing to Jem. She reached across the couch and cupped Lyra’s face in her hands for a solemn moment before pulling her into a hug.
The struggle in dealing with her mom was real. Lyra was weirded out about where Jem's behaviour was coming from (and where it was going to?) but how could she turn down her mom, like, genuinely apologising? Jem had been real aggro about Lyra bringing home a book of saints, and while Lyra got Jem’s beef with Catholicism, the way she’d snapped at Lyra about it sucked, and sure, she’d gotten over it (in her own opinion, more or less) cuz she understood it was just what living with Jem was like sometimes… it was still really nice to hear her say sorry, and to be pulled into a big hug.
“My girls,” Jocelyn said fondly, hand over her heart as she stepped into the room (around a clothes horse.) “That’s what I like to see. Now who’s going to help me clean this place up?”
The rest of Christmas Eve passed in a flurry of activity, and a couple of hours before midnight when Lyra was deep in the fridge trying to rearrange it to fit the chicken breasts she was brining overnight, Jocelyn got a call to say that one of the women from three floors down was going into labour, and could Jocelyn please watch her son?? So Christmas day saw the small apartment packed full with three year old Jemma and five year old Micky and forty nine year old Dante who was about as much help as the kids when it came to meal prep. Lyra had the brined chicken now marinating in lime juice (fake stuff, from a bottle) and was washing the breakfast dishes with her mom while Jocelyn worked on dessert, and yeah, she knew this was an unfair division of labour (Dante was watching Peppa Pig with the kids) but also, she’d spent a lot of time today texting Avery while he sat through an awkward family dinner. If she said anything cutting about how maybe Dante would like a turn on the tea towel, she was risking someone saying ‘why, so you have more time for texting’ and then Jocelyn might ask her to put her phone away.
Lyra didn’t want to give up the little jolt of excitement she was getting every time another message came through, so she didn’t say anything about Dante, and carried on trying to rescue Avery from afar while wielding a damp tea towel against the dishes. (She kinda wanted to sneak away and send Avery a picture that was way inappropriate to look at while at the dinnertable with his family, because his reactions to that gave her life, and she wanted him to tell her how much he wanted her to be there, but she hadn’t had a chance to escape.)
Dante tended to avoid her though, as much as it was possible to avoid someone while spending the day with them in a small apartment. The first time Lyra had met Dante she had been deeply unpleasant to him, because he was the reason her mom had stayed in Mexico for so long and after she’d told her mom she’d forgiven her, all that anger and resentment and betrayal and hurt had to go somewhere and she’d channeled it straight at him.
But she was over that now, too (again, more or less) and today she was straight up grateful for Dante’s presence because he had one really great thing going for him: he didn’t know shit about saints.
When Patrick showed up for dinner, everyone was gonna have to be normal. Jem wouldn’t be able to go asking Patrick any weird questions about saints or God or Jesus or miracles, and Lyra was all for not dealing with that on Christmas. With Dante there, Patrick could just hang out with her family and get to know them without needing to explain the intricacies of his own existence and Lyra could hang out with her dad without needing to struggle to get her head around… well, the intricacies of his own existence. They were gonna eat and drink and sing and figure out the new shape of this family and no one was gonna do anything that resulted in a stressed out shouting argument after all the men had left.
Hopefully.
Things in the kitchen were under control by the time the doorbell rang, and Lyra was the first one there, jumping round a chair to reach it and pull it open. Her hair was bound up in two fat plaits, a red ribbon in one and a green in the other, and she was wearing a string of silver tinsel as a scratchy (but worth it for the Aesthetic) scarf. "Hi! Merry Christmas! Welcome!" She grinned at him, freckled cheeks dimpled and excitement (maybe some nerves) bubbling inside her, and then dove into a tight little hug.