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“Have you ever been in love?” Lucretia asks, looking up at the night sky.
They’re fifty-three years in. Her skin should be wrinkled, her face sagging, her hair dry and withered, like corn tassels against her cheeks. As it is, her brown skin is as soft as it’s ever been, her hair in two schoolgirl-style braids, and she sits below the stars like a child, asking have you ever been in love?
“I don’t know,” says Magnus beside her, as fresh-faced as the day he walked into IPRE training for the first time. “I don’t think so. Why do you ask?”
Lucretia swallows, thinking back to the gentle kiss Barry had pressed to Lup’s forehead that morning at breakfast, the duet at the Legato Conservatory, the way they’ve started sleeping in the same bed, the way their late-night conversations sometimes filter through the Starblaster’s vents, Lup’s voice gentler than Lucretia’s ever heard it.
“Do you ever look at Lup and Barry and just… ache?” she asks. Magnus furrows his brow.
“How do you mean?” he asks.
“They’re–” she starts. “They’re so in love. In a–in a way I don’t think I’ll ever be. In a way I don’t–” she cuts herself off.
“I don’t think I can love like that,” she tells him. “I don’t even know if I want to.”
“That’s okay,” Magnus says. “There’s no right way to love.”
“Yeah, there is,” Lucretia says softly. “When you say ‘in love,’ there’s a–there’s an implication–”
“–of romance,” Magnus finishes for her.
“Yeah,” Lucretia says.
Maybe it’s the fact that physically, she’s still barely an adult. Twenty-three years young; maybe that’s why she hasn’t felt it. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t want to feel it. It’s more believable for her to be a late bloomer at twenty-three than at seventy-six.
“I think I could fall in love,” Magnus says. “If I met the right person. If I–If I really got to know them. I don’t–I don’t think I could fall in love like Taako does, but like Barry and Lup, maybe. They–they’ve had time.”
Magnus looks to her for some kind of confirmation. Lucretia just nods. She doesn’t know quite what he means, but she’s always been confused by the way Taako’s been able to fall for boy after boy on planet after planet. Lucretia once watched him kiss a boy in an alleyway in Tesseralia; just stood like a ghost under a streetlight wondering how?
“If I had that kind of time with the right person,” Magnus says, breaking Lucretia out of her recollection, “I think I could fall in love.”
“I don’t think I could,” Lucretia says. “I don’t think I will.”
“That’s okay,” Magnus tells her. “Maybe I won’t either.”
“Yeah, you will,” she tells him, because she knows it’s true. He’s so full of love for everyone and everything in a way that Lucretia knows she could never be. Magnus is unapologetic in his love, and she doesn’t even think he knows how beautiful it is. The ever-growing row of wooden ducks that sits in front of Fisher’s tank, the smile he shoots across the breakfast table when he knows someone’s had a rough night. The way he instinctually leans into whoever’s standing next to him, his gentle touch letting them know that he’s there. That’s love.
“If I don’t,” he says, “we can get married.”
A surprised giggle escapes from Lucretia’s mouth before she can help herself. “What?” she asks, unable to keep a smile off her face.
“When we break the cycle,” he says–and how Magnus is it that he says when and not if?–“If neither of us fall in love, we can get married. Settle down. Adopt a dog. Whatever we want.”
Lucretia laughs. “We can’t just get married,” she says.
“Why not?” Magnus asks.
“We’re not in love!” she points out. “We’re not–”
“Aren’t we?” asks Magnus. “I mean, not in the–not in the Lup and Barry way, but, I mean–I love you. You’re my family.”
Lucretia thinks about it. That indescribable feeling she’s got for every member of their little crew. The purity of it, the way she can sometimes almost feel it tingling at her fingertips. She’s always thought of in love for being like in fairy tales, for being like her mother and father, for being like Lup and Barry. An unconditional, unparalleled happily ever after; dancing in the kitchen to a dual melody that floats over the hills. But what she’s got is… not the same, exactly, but just as powerful. The sound of any iteration of her name in Taako’s voice– Luce, Creesh, Lucy Lou. The feeling of Merle tucking a flower behind her ear. Lup’s face when she calls her babe. Davenport’s hand on her forehead when she comes down with the flu. The fancy new journal wrapped in newspaper that Barry leaves outside her door without a word. Magnus’ arm around her shoulder as she drifts off to sleep. That’s all love.
So Lucretia smiles. “Yeah,” she says. “I guess we’re in love.”
Magnus is beaming now, and Lucretia rests her head on his shoulder.
The way his arms wrap around her is immediate; his left arm around her shoulder and his right hand in hers. And it is safe and warm and as the stars twinkle above them, Lucretia thinks of the life they could have. A cottage by the ocean, a cool sea breeze that ruffles their white lace curtains. Dancing to the radio as the sun sets, orange marmalade on toast for breakfast. A golden retriever chases Magnus down the beach as Lucretia sits in the sand and writes. Their friends visit often; Taako and Lup commandeer their little kitchen to make the shrimp gumbo that tastes so much like home. Davenport and Merle gather around the fireplace and drink more alcohol than their respective three- and four-foot frames might suggest that they should. Barry watches Lup with stars in his eyes as Taako twirls her over his shoulder, her golden-blonde hair spinning out around her shoulders as she smiles. Maybe Lup and Barry have a kid, a baby who toddles down the beach after her mother as her father holds her little hand in his, making sure she doesn’t fall.
“Maybe we can get a cat, too,” Lucretia suggests, and she can’t see Magnus’ reaction from her current position, her head on his shoulder, but she can almost feel him smile.
“Yeah,” he says. “That'd be nice.”
Lucretia smiles, closing her eyes and breathing in the night air around her. Magnus keeps holding her, and somehow, she knows she’s home.
(Decades later, she leads him by the hand in a daze to stone columns and wooden bridges, to a woman with a face full of freckles and a fire in her eyes. A fire that Magnus can get to know. A fire that will give him time).
(Often, from her office above the earth, Lucretia thinks of their little cottage by the beach, the home that never was. She thinks of sea breeze and orange marmalade, and a part of her aches).