WHO: Lyra and Avery WHEN: Monday, Dec 27th WHERE: The Duffield manor, Tennessee WHAT: Relationship status: in cahoots with WARNINGS: Some in-the-past brother on brother violence
Lyra didn’t think there'd ever been a time when she'd walked into a social situation with the aim of not getting on with someone before. She liked people, generally, and on the previous two occasions where she’d met the family of someone she was dating – the parents of a guy she’d dated in high school, the sister of a guy she’d met on Tinder a couple of years ago – she’d tried hard to make sure she got on with them.
But Avery’s family? Everything he’d told her about them screamed of toxicity. Lyra had absolutely no desire to try and be friends with a woman who tried to pressure her son into straightness, or a man who thought abortion was murder and climate change was a lie. If Avery had asked her to try and get on with them for his sake, if he’d given her any indication that upsetting them might cause some horrible backlash on him then yeah, she might’ve tried to tone herself down, but Avery’s attitude when it came to her meeting his parents seemed to be ‘fuck them up’.
And they were such a… a human problem! In the quietest, sleepless parts of the night Lyra’s skin still crawled when she thought about how Apollo had got inside her head and twisted up her beliefs. She remembered the way she’d felt when he’d peeled the curse off Avery, and how her own mind had changed as if it wasn’t hers at all. How it had felt like her understanding of the world (and worse, of herself) was dissolving with her conviction that Avery had been lying to her.
She still thought about how unrepentant Apollo had been, how everything she’d yelled at him glanced off him, how badly she’d wanted to be a problem for him as much as he was a problem for Rosario and how his attitude made her feel like she might as well be trying to shout down a mountain. Or a tornado. Like he was some overwhelmingly big force of nature and she was so tiny and she hated it.
Avery’s parents might be rich, white, privileged assholes, but they weren’t immortal gods with the ability to curse people on a whim. They literally had no power over her. Lyra wanted to make sure they knew it and, in doing so, remind herself of that fact as well. She wasn’t planning on being a bitch, but she was planning on being unrepentantly herself and if that made them uncomfortable then that was their problem.
There was a certain kind of satisfaction in getting the chance to fight back against something shitty in the world. And to fight back with someone else, someone who took up most of her thoughts at night, these days, someone whose – if she was being real cheesy bout it – smile made her heart lift.
She’d missed him since he’d been gone. It’d been a week and a half since she’d seen him, since he’d started calling her things like glorious and my girlfriend and dear god, was he ever on her mind. Him and the way he buried his hands in her hair while he kissed her. And what it felt like going to sleep beside him. And the moments when his sarcastic façade dropped and she got to see underneath it. And when said sarcastic façade made her laugh. And had she mentioned the kissing? It was hard to stop thinking about being kissed. Or, for that matter, fucked. Fucked and then curled up tight with, after. Hard not to just close her eyes on the plane and drift off into steamy daydreams, thinking about the things she could lean over and whisper to him if he was sitting in the seat beside her.
It made the trip pass both quickly, and at the same time, agonisingly slowly. But it did keep her mind from drifting to her last trip to Tennessee, or rather, the trip back. Not something she needed to think about. Definitely not something she wanted to think about.
One more reminder that she’d been tiny and caught up in something too powerful to control? No, she'd stick with thoughts of her sexy smartass boyfriend, thank you very much.
She and Rosario had Googled Avery's place and together they’d both sworn emphatically about it. A lot. The size and expanse of it had rocked her at first. He’d said his family was rich but… but sometimes people who grew up rich couldn’t describe how rich was rich, and Avery wasn’t descriptive at the best of times (unless he was talking about something that excited him, which didn’t include his family home) so she hadn’t been prepared for the pictures that came up on screen. But several deep breaths and several stunned expletives and several days to come to terms with it had passed between now and then, and she was once again feeling stubborn and – to be honest – self-righteous enough to deal.
Seeing the long sweep of the driveway, though, and the way the house loomed over her, and the way the stone steps to the front doors fanned out at the base and narrowed at the top like the doors were ‘bout to gape open and eat her, she had to admit, it all gave her a little bit of pause.
She had to remind herself that Avery was in there and needed rescuing. Avery who’d walked into Alpha Pi Omicron to demand release from his curse (and she remembered the way, when he’d been talking ‘bout the things the curse had taken from him, he’d mentioned her) so if he could do that, she could climb outta the taxi and look up at the manor undaunted. She could pause at the fountain outside their front doors to lace up her knock off chucks, and not even freak right in the depth of her belly that some member of his family once decided the best thing to spend their money on (and fountain installation hadn’t been part of her building programme but she’d goddamn looked it up) was a fountain to spruce up the place. Cuz that’s what every drought-prone state needed, right? A fucking fountain?
Yeah, fuck them.
Lyra grabbed the straps of her backpack, set her shoulders back, thought indigestible thoughts, and walked up the stone steps to be eaten.