Chapter Text
You show up to Declan's door with store-bought cookies and a Crock Pot of kreplach and chicken soup – which Maggie cooked, and it is an endless source of amusement for her that she's a better Jewish cook than you are. It has also been the topic of many of your Skype sessions with Becca, because Eli is a better cook than she is.
“Sydney!” It's Krista who opens the door, looking all of her seven months pregnant. She is a very pretty woman, blonde and just about your height. She always wears big, colorful earrings when she's not working – on an oil rig off the coast. Last Hanukkah she sent you a menorah that she had hand-made and welded together. It's perfect, one of your favorite possessions, because it blends the old traditions with a more modern look.
You return her hug while Maggie goes off in search of Declan. “It's good to see you. How are you doing?”
“You know how pregnancy is,” Krista says. “Everything hurts all the time, I never know what I want to eat or do, I fall asleep standing up, and yet I'm still so in awe of this little miracle.” Krista waddles through to the kitchen with you, where Maggie and Declan are somehow already in a gummy bear fight while Leo scrambles around underneath them, picking up their fallen bullets and trying to shove them into his mouth. “Declan!” Krista swats him on the head as he's mid-throw, resulting in Maggie getting pegged hard in the cheek.
You reach down to pick up Leo, and he responds instantly with a joyous yell of “Aunt Sydney!”
“You two should really be more careful with your projectiles,” you say, Krista leaning against the counter and fixing both Declan and Maggie with a fierce glare. You wonder if this is something that comes with motherhood. You hope so.
“Let us live.” Maggie kisses you on the cheek. “We don't need them, right Leo?” She looks at him very seriously.
“Aunt Sydney is the best!” Leo says.
Maggie ruffles his hair and puts an arm around your waist. “You bet she is, kiddo.” She looks back over at Declan. “When's Mom getting here?”
“She's already here. Sort of. She went to the store to get more green beans.” Declan, you know, loves green beans more than any other food – Maggie used to steal cans of green beans in the middle of the night and hide them amongst her mountain of stuffed animals just to work him up.
There is a little bit of a cooler air that settles over the room at the mention of the twins' mom, and you know it's mostly to do with you. For whatever reason Catherine loves Krista, even though her job requires her to be away two weeks out of every month. She still hasn't warmed to you – and you're only sort of bitter about it, because you see Maggie every night and you even have fairly regular hours now and you spend every Saturday outside with her while she tends to her extremely large, ever-growing garden. But no. Catherine still resents you because you are a doctor, because you left Maggie before. It's fine. You don't really need Catherine's approval.
It's fine.
Things go well after that, even when Catherine gets back. She hugs Maggie for a long time and then moves over to you, and it is a perfectly acceptable if not particularly warm hug. You and Krista volunteer to prepare and finish up the cooking while Maggie, Declan, and Catherine take Leo out in the snow. From the kitchen window you can see the four of them playing – Catherine is so different with Leo than she is with you or Krista, or even Declan and Maggie. She lights up, and you can see Maggie in her, which is a feat. Maggie doesn't really look like either of her parents, while, except for eye shape and a shade lighter skin and hair, Declan is the spitting image of his dad. Sometimes, though, when Catherine smiles, it's very clear that both Maggie and Declan got that particular gesture from their mother. You've even seen her do a more subtle version of Maggie's trademark eyebrow quirk.
You all sit down to watch “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” after a satisfying Christmas dinner. You and Catherine don't say much, letting mostly Leo carry the conversation with his endless questions about London, which Maggie fields. The couch only fits three adults so you sit in Maggie's dad's old leather armchair, half on the armrest and half on Maggie's lap. Leo makes it through the first half hour or so before passing out on top of Krista.
The conversation somehow turns to whether or not Mr. and Mrs. Claus had an arranged marriage, or how they even met, and you make some lame joke like, “They probably both had overbearing Jewish moms, there's no getting out of that” and then Catherine just has to say –
“But there is, isn't there?” Catherine's Irish accent isn't always prominent in everyday speech, but you can hear the lilt of it in that sentence, so you brace yourself – “Weren't you engaged once? In that exact situation? You got out of it.” And of course the unsaid implication is if you could get out of that you can get out of your relationship with my daughter.
Maggie is the first to say something in your defense, as always, b’syata d’shmaya. “Mom, stop. That's none of your business, it happened a long time ago, and you know nothing about it.”
“I'm only trying to understand.”
“You're trying to blame her.”
Catherine's eyes flicker to you for a moment, as if debating how much to say. “Maggie, she left you!”
“OK, well, we're going to put Leo to bed,” Declan says, springing up from the couch. He offers his hand to Krista. “See you in the morning.” Any good-byes from the three of you remaining are drowned out by the quick footsteps of Declan and Krista up the stairs.
Maggie grips you protectively around your waist, and it never ceases to amaze you how devoted she is to you; it's hard to believe that you once thought you were just an experiment, a charity case, someone she liked greatly as a friend and pitied enough to pretend to return romantic affections. But she has proved, time and time again and in many different ways, that she is utterly taken by you. “I know she left. She left, and I stayed. She wasn't ready to stay still, and I was too afraid to move. But now we're not. We're in it for each other more than anything else.”
“Are you sure?”
You sort of want to yell at Catherine for talking about you like you aren't in the room, so you say, “Yes, I'm sure. Anywhere we go, we go together.”
Catherine lets out this strange noise that's not really anything you can codify, but it sounds extremely aggressive and derisive.
“Mom.” Maggie is visibly upset now, using her free hand to play with her Star of David necklace. “How do you even know about her engagement? I never told you.”
“You told Declan.” There is a bit of hurt in her voice.
“Because I knew Declan would understand!” Maggie's voice raises in both pitch and volume. “You would never have thought about the whole picture, just like you're doing now. There is so much more to it, and you'll never know about it because you're never going to get past the fact that Sydney was engaged.” She sighs and looks at you. “We don't need this. Do you want to go to bed?”
You just nod, unsure of how to act in this situation. You can feel Catherine staring at you, and Maggie guides you up to the guest room – soon to be a bedroom for baby number two – without any words, only her hand pressing gently into you back. Once the door is closed, you take her face in your hands and kiss her cheeks, her nose, her jaw – for some reason this always makes her giggle, and even now there's no exception. She settles down a little bit and starts slowly unbuttoning your shirt. Her eyes meet yours, and you nod.
Tonight Maggie is slow and meticulous – she rarely lets you touch her the way she's touching you, and even then not for long. By the time she brings you to a slow climax she has kissed all of your skin, and you have to wipe away a few tears as she crawls back up your body. She whispers that she loves you, how proud of you she is into your shoulder as her fingers lazily draw across your stomach. Usually she tries to write things, but you've never been good at guessing what they are. Until now, safe with Maggie wrapped around, you didn't realize how much it hurt to have Catherine reduce one of the most traumatic experiences of your life to a weapon to be used against you. But it hadn't rocked Maggie. You have to take comfort in that.
You wake up a few hours later, Maggie's body flung away from yours except for an arm still haphazardly around your shoulders, with a great need for water. Your pajamas are in the suitcase, so you rummage around quietly in the dark for a few moments before stumbling out into the hallway. Everything is quiet, and neither Declan and Krista's room nor Leo's room where Catherine is sleeping have lights on. You're not certain what time it is.
The light in the kitchen is on, and you assume it's Krista, up with a late-night craving or looking for painkillers. But it's not. It's Catherine, in a bathrobe and pajamas, standing by the sink with a cup of tea and her eyes on the dark snow in Declan's backyard.
She turns around at the sound of your footsteps on the hardwood. “Sydney.”
“Catherine.” You rub at your arm, feeling small and like you are back in this same position with your own mother. “I just, um, came down for some water.”
“Suit yourself, love.” And then she turns back around to the window.
You can let a lot things go, but she is actively ignoring you now, and that can't stand. All of the things you've done, this should be nothing. “I've known I was gay since I was eleven or twelve.”
This gets her attention; she faces you and sips from her mug using both hands. Her expression doesn't change.
“Every day, since I was eleven or twelve, I had to live with knowing that I could never be considered whole and complete in the eyes of Judaism unless I married man. And that thought disgusted me. It still does. I don't...I don't even like to think about it. But I kept going. I went through medical school, and I thought that that would help, to focus on something else. And it did. I was fine, until I met your daughter.”
You pause, hoping that Catherine will say something. She is impossible to read, still drinking her tea. “I went seventeen years able to keep everything buried. Seventeen years. I never did anymore than look at a woman. I barely even did that. And then I kissed Maggie in an on-call room because I just couldn't not do it. An entire lifetime of self-discipline, gone. And the risks? My entire family, my whole community, my whole life being taken away from me.”
“That seems like a lot to stake on a kiss,” Catherine finally says.
You relax a little bit after that, leaning against the wall. “It was. But I...Maggie told me how you met her dad.”
Catherine gives a warm laugh at that. “In Immigration of all places, fighting about him cutting me in line.”
“Maggie loves that story,” you say. “How you were yelling at each other one minute and the next he was asking you to dinner. Because there was something about you that overcame his reason, that overcame any reason. That's why I kissed her the first time. And the next few times after that. My engagement...it was a reaction to kissing her. I thought marriage would cure me, somehow, that G-d would make me as whole with my fiancee as in the five seconds I'd felt with Maggie.” You shrug. This is the most you've talked about Hershel and the engagement in years. “He was a good man. But he was still a man.”
There is a long silence here, during which Catherine puts down her cup. She seems to be weighing something in her mind, and you're inclined to let her talk for a little bit. “The first time you left wasn't so bad. She called and talked to me for awhile. She mentioned that you left. I figured she'd be fine. But when you went off to Israel...she called me every day for a month. Maggie and I don't have the best relationship, I know that, but she always calls whenever something bad happens. She never talks about what's bothering her, but I know. You almost wrecked her the second time.”
“I know.” It comes out as a whisper, because that's still a sore spot for you. If you'd only read her better, understood the depth of her feelings earlier, it would've been so different. But – “I wasn't ready. Not to be with her. It felt like we were circling each other for three years, waiting for it to be time. We were waiting for when the need to be with each other would outweigh the things in our lives that were keeping us apart. And for so long it didn't, and then it did.”
“How do you know it always will?” Catherine has dropped her crossed arms and just has her hands resting on the counters.
You think about this before answering, because maybe this is what has worried Catherine more than anything. Maybe she does see how much you truly love Maggie – really it would be odd if she couldn't – but she has a fear that one day those scales will flip, the same way her husband's did. So you decide to go with honesty. “I can't. Nobody can. Nobody Maggie could meet would be able to promise that. But I love her. I am in her life as long as she will have me. Even if the romance were to somehow end, even if, she's such a part of my life I don't want to be without her, not again.”
Catherine nods very slowly, once, twice, three times. “When I married Bao, I loved him very much. And when I divorced him, I loved him very much. Until the day he died I loved him very much, and I believe he loved me just as much. But that wasn't enough to make us happy.”
You pick your next words very carefully – this is a challenge. “Maggie and I don't just love each other; we chose each other. At the end of the day Maggie ran after me, and I ran back to her. I know it's no guarantee, nothing is, but I'd choose her again. I do. I choose her every day.”
There is a tense silence. Catherine turns away from you and dumps the rest of her tea in the sink. She turns on the water, letting it fill the cup.
“She looks happy, when she's around you,” is what Catherine finally says.
“Thank you.”
Catherine leaves the kitchen with a bittersweet smirk on her face – it reminds you so much of Maggie. She hesitates for a split-second while passing you, then puts a hand on your shoulder before walking off.
This is...a lot. You touch the place where her hand was, and you wonder what has just happened. There is obviously still a long way to go with Catherine, and much of that way she'll have to walk alone; she hasn't quite reckoned with Bao and all the things he meant and did to her, with her, for her. But perhaps she will separate those things from you.
When you get back into bed, Maggie stirs and immediately rolls over to hug you. She wrinkles her nose. “You're not naked.”
“I went to the kitchen to get some water,” you say, smiling at her sleepy mumbling.
“You should be naked again.”
And as Christmas morning starts to make its way across the horizon, you slip in next to her – naked, as requested – with a lightness that seems to only come to you as you grow older.