WHO: Lyra and Jem WHEN: After the download session, later on the night of the 4th WHERE: Lyra’s place WHAT: Next up, telling mom WARNINGS: Nah
Jem’s reaction was the antithesis of Jocelyn’s, but Lyra had figured it was gonna be. Any major stance Jocelyn took in life, it was pretty much guaranteed Jem would take the opposite. An exhausting way to live, but – as Lyra always told herself, looking for the good – at least it was predictable?
God, not that anything Jem was doing was predictable, these days.
First, she’d just looked at Lyra, as Lyra stood there in her bedroom and bounced her fists awkwardly off her thighs.
Then she’d thrown her arms around Lyra’s neck and burst into tears.
Then she’d said “oh, hallelujah.”
So.
Yeah.
“Mom?” Lyra pulled back a little, though she’d wrapped her arms around Jem when she’d started crying because of course she’d hugged her mom when she started crying. Jem laughed through her tears in almost the same way that Lyra had cry-laughed at Rosario, and she cupped Lyra’s face in her hands.
“Love,” she explained, like the word was a revelation. “Don’t you remember? At Christmas, your father blessed you with love, and you’ve found it, so quickly, and you’re married.” She pressed a kiss between Lyra’s eyes, which had widened dramatically. Blessed her with love? That wasn’t exactly how Lyra remembered that awkward as fuck moment going down. “He said that he would look after us,” Jem beamed at her. “And look what he sent you.”
“He didn’t send me Avery,” Lyra leaned away from her mother in horror. “I met him ages before I even found Patrick.” Okay, yeah, fine, so ages here was a matter of weeks, but that was beside the point, which was: they had nothing to do with each other.
She could joke about the universe sending her a trust fund, but when it came down to it…it was just a… a way of looking at things, that made them make a bit of sense? She didn’t really think that the universe had a consciousness, that it made choices.
Her mom was slapping a face – and a name, and motivations – on Lyra’s own actions, and it was… just no?!
She scrabbled to try and sort out her own thoughts about this. Patrick was a person, he was not a… a force, right? And Lyra couldn’t see him as a tool sent by God, either, whatever he believed about himself, her brain couldn’t wrap around that. No person who walked round this earth same as her had anything to do with her choices that night. Cept Avery, obviously. And Lyra really resented (and was a little freaked out by) the idea that anyone outside of herself and Avery (and anything other than a cocktail of oxytocin and adrenaline and, well, actual cocktails) had the power to have anything to do with their decision to get married. No one else was messing with her thoughts or her choices or anything, now or then!
“This ain’t got nothing to do with Patrick,” she insisted, failing to translate her thoughts into words on the spot. She refused to believe she’d been manipulated into this by a blessing, though, because fuck that.
“You didn’t feel it, baby, but I did,” Jem said, pressing her hand against her chest. “I felt it, it was as if, for a moment, there was nothing in the world to worry about. It was peace, and it was love, just the faintest touch of something pure— a glimpse into how everything could be.”
“That— mom, that has nothing to do with me getting married!”
“It has everything to do with it,” Jem said, certain, and with a little, sympathetic smile that her daughter wasn’t. “Aren’t you happier?”
“I mean,” Lyra said, sure she was playing into Jem’s hand somehow but what else was she supposed to say. She couldn’t lie about it, she was happier. “Yeah?”
“See?” Jem shook her head fondly, eyes closed to help ignore the look that bordered skepticism and alarm on her daughter’s face, and she stepped forward to hug her again. Lyra didn’t know what to say. She felt the same kind of discomfort she’d felt when watching Patrick bless Jem at their Christmas dinner. No, moreso, cuz that’d just been about witnessing something she felt she shouldn’t be witnessing and this was worse. But: “Everything’s going to be alright,” Jem said, and kissed her forehead one more time. “I’m so happy for you, baby, everything’s going to be alright.”
And, well, maybe it would? Lyra lay in bed thinking about it later, waiting for Avery to reply to her goodnight text before she went to sleep. Maybe Lyra could convince herself that it didn’t really matter, what her mom believed, cuz at least she wasn't against it? And Lyra sure didn’t believe that her saintly father had blessed her into marriage, because that was weird and creepy as fuck, and Patrick was a little weird, sure, but not in a creepy as fuck way. She was mad curious about what he’d think, though she was a little too exhausted by her last three marriage confessions to tell him in person, which maybe made her a coward...
The first day they'd met, though, he'd told her and Rosario about how so many forms of marriage back in Ireland had been a kind of slavery, how he stood against that, so she had no idea what kind of reaction she was going to get out of him and she was tired. She'd just have to prove to him that, well… obviously that wasn’t what this marriage was going to be.
And she'd have to prove to Jocelyn it wasn’t going to ruin her life.
And she'd have to prove to her mom it wasn’t part of some divine plan.
Cuz it wasn't, and it wasn't, and it wasn't. Rosario had put it best of all, short and simple: Is that what you want?
It was. It really was. The fact that she was missing Avery so badly while lying in her stupid bed alone spoke to that. She’d really liked waking up with him in his childhood bedroom, and entangled tightly on that couch in the stables, and sprawled out on that massive, massive bed in Vegas. The fact that she couldn’t roll over right now and slide an arm around his waist sucked. So yeah, she wanted him more than pretty much anything, right now.
And she did really, really want to believe that everything was going to be alright. She thought about Avery kissing her and Rosario curling up on the seat next to her and Patrick hugging her tight at Christmas, and Jocelyn, she’d come round, she would, cos Lyra knew she loved her, and at least her mom was happy for her even if she was weird about it, and… things would be alright. She'd show them.
She shoved her phone under her pillow after Avery had replied, and curled up to sleep, her hands tucked up by her face to keep her fingers warm, one hand curled beneath her face and her mouth pressed against the ring, feeling loved and wanted and special.
But— just to be fucking clear: not blessed by divine powers special. Just… a boy likes me special. Which was better. Which was way, way better.