Chapter Text
Hecate dreaded going home for the holidays. The stress of it. The cheer. The holiday traditions. All of which involved other people. Even the thought of it was exhausting. It was just a lot when half the time all she wanted to do was collapse into bed and curl up with a good book.
Dimity patted her arm sympathetically before taking that moment to charge into the forest. Her sword drawn and blazing, she chopped down the nearest orc with a mighty slash, blood spraying everywhere, and sprinted headlong towards the towering fire giant up ahead and her assured death. Beside her, Maria had knelt to taste a magnificent mushroom. It emitted an eerie green light, glowing with enchantment. The self-proclaimed cook for the merry band of marauders, Maria had been intrigued by the possibility of a new ingredient, and now, she too was lying prostrate on the ground with a beatific smile on her face, irretrievably lost to the land of dreams as a potent poison coursed through her body.
Hecate glanced up to meet curious brown eyes peering out at her from behind large, round frames. Daisy was watching her expectantly, wearing that same perpetual look of confusion, while one hand nervously combed through his thick dark beard. Hecate had no idea what to do. Chase after Dimity, which was surely a suicide mission, or roll her luck at healing Maria?
Luck was rarely on Hecate’s side, and a mere three turns later, Dimity and Hecate were dead, their bodies mercilessly crushed and singed by the fire giant, while Maria remained trapped in her delirious stupor, alive but just barely and unlikely to regain consciousness without significant aid. It had been a blood bath.
Daisy took off his glasses and dabbed at his brow with a handkerchief. “Well, that didn’t go as planned.”
“Does it ever?” Hecate scoffed dryly. “Your girlfriend is too busy tasting woodland flora to help in any of the battles, and Dimity’s barbarian doesn’t bother with strategy.”
“I have a lot of hit points. That’s what I do!” Dimity exclaimed innocently. “Besides, you’re the brains on the team. I’m the brawn.”
“How imaginative,” Hecate drawled. “So, basically, we’re just playing ourselves. I thought the whole point of D&D was to adopt a different persona.”
Snatching up her neglected beer bottle, Dimity released a nonchalant chuckle in response, “Whatever.” To Daisy, she added more encouragingly, “We’ll try again in the new year. Maybe next time, we’ll actually survive.”
“Doubtful,” Hecate intoned.
“I still want to know what it tasted like,” Maria chimed in with a shrug.
“Honey bear, I told you,” Daisy said, wrapping his arm around the petite woman as Maria nestled comfortably into his side. “It was sweet like peppermint but with a bitter aftertaste.”
“I know that’s what you said,” Maria pouted in faux irritation. “But I can’t quite picture it. What’s the point of trying new food if you can’t imagine it?”
Daisy ruffled his messy hair in exasperation. “You weren’t supposed to try it,” he tried to convince his stubborn girlfriend for the hundredth time. “It was pulsing green with a malevolent aura. I don’t think I could have signaled ‘danger’ any more clearly. It’s like you all have a death wish. Next time, I’ll have you wander through some sleepy town.” At that, his eyes swiveled intensely around the room in turn as if daring each one of them to think up a path to death in such a peaceful scenario.
Maria puffed out a laugh and gently tugged on his beard to press a reassuring kiss against Daisy’s cheek. “I promise we’ll be on our best behavior. Send us to a tavern. After a few drinks, Dimity will be caught up in a brawl, and Hecate will be happily chatting up all the pretty barmaids.”
“And you?” Daisy asked dubiously.
“I’ll be at the bakery next door, earning a few gold pieces as their new apprentice,” Maria said glibly. “Don’t give up on us, my cute little Dungeon Master.”
Daisy relented with a good-humored roll of his eyes. Grabbing the last handful of chips from the bowl on the wooden table, he popped one into his mouth, a generous dusting of cheese falling into his beard. As he stood to refill the bowl before the movie, the rest relocated to the couches. Plopping down, Dimity turned a playful gaze to Hecate, “So, Hecate, what’re your plans this year?”
“Oh, you know us Hardbrooms. It’s an election year. It’ll be a lot of posed family photos and campaign events. My mom wants me to come down early and stay through New Year’s. A whole two weeks of family fun,” Hecate said with a grimace. “You and Julie? Are she and Millie coming tonight, by the way?”
Dimity shook her head. “Julie’s got a shift, and Millie’s with her gran tonight ---”
“So, I’m hearing you didn’t have any better plans,” Maria teased as she settled onto the couch opposite.
“No,” Dimity denied, her tone scandalized, as she chucked a pillow in Maria’s direction, but the other woman smartly caught the overstuffed pillow and only tucked it smugly behind her head. “And this is tradition. Have I ever missed Christmas movie night?” Dimity whirled around to face Hecate, wordlessly demanding a third-party defense.
“Not yet,” Maria insinuated. Hecate just shook her head, laughing quietly into her wineglass as she patently refused to get involved.
“Oh, please,” Dimity said, “don’t even joke about that. You all are family.”
“And don’t you forget it when you and Julie get hitched,” Maria said with a nudge of her foot and a raise of her glass. Julie Hubble had been the nurse on duty when Dimity had injured her knee after a pick-up basketball game a year and a half ago, and the two had been inseparable ever since. With Dimity already practically co-parenting Julie’s daughter, Mildred, it was only a matter of time before they made it official.
“Anyway,” Dimity continued with a pointed look, “my gran’s going to come here this year to join us for Christmas, and then I’ll drive her back home before New Year’s. If you need an escape from all the Hardbroom family fun, just give me a call.”
Hecate groaned and sagged into her friend in silent thanks before asking Maria, “What about you and Daisy?”
Maria snuck a glance behind her to check on Daisy in the kitchen. They could hear kernels popping in the background as Daisy yanked open the microwave door. She lowered her voice, “Ugh, you know what my family’s like. They still ---”
“They still hate me,” Daisy interjected bluntly, suddenly sticking his head out of the connecting doorway.
Maria winced. “They don’t hate you.” Maria came from a large, very Catholic, very Italian family, and the brusque Tapiocas had yet to welcome Daisy into the fold. “They’re protective. They’re just warming up to you.”
“It’s been three years,” Daisy replied skeptically, readjusting his slipping spectacles. Maria and Daisy tended to split their Christmas vacation between their two families, and Daisy swore the Tapiocas hated him for it. The Daisys were Hindu and did not celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday but still enjoyed all the secular festivities. “You know, they don’t like to feel left out,” Daisy had offered with a jolly shrug.
Maria and Daisy had met online, and the cerebral, if absent-minded, Daisy in his tweed jacket and round spectacles had not quite fit the rugged masculine mold of Maria’s previous boyfriends. But by that point, Maria had dated her fair share of rough-and-tumble men, and Daisy’s clumsy sweetness had been a refreshing change of pace. While he wooed the mushy romantic in her that she usually kept so well-hidden, she grounded the ever-fanciful Daisy and focused his scattered thoughts, for which the Daisys, including his sister Vinita, were ever grateful.
According to Maria, when she first met Vinita, the woman had pulled her into a tight hug, confiding with palpable relief, “You don’t know how many fires you’ve saved us from!”
“A few explosions never hurt anybody” had been Daisy’s cheerful response. Or so Maria had uncharacteristically giggled in her retelling, finding his whole bit charming. At the time, Hecate had deemed it nothing short of worrisome, but, over the years, she had come to learn that Daisy, albeit eccentric, was as harmless as a kitten and just as doting in his affections. Hecate could wish little better for her friend.
As for the Tapiocas, no matter how loudly Maria proclaimed she preferred Christmas with the Daisys to all their noise and bluster, let alone midnight Mass, which she never dared skip, they did not seem to hear it.
Several hours and two and a half movies later, Hecate and Dimity were snuggled together on the couch. Maria and Daisy had left after Elf, citing an early start the next morning. In the hush, Dimity broached, “So is this the year?”
Hecate sighed. She hoped so. “I’ll tell them after Christmas.”
“That’s what you say every year,” Dimity reminded with a nudge of her shoulder.
“I know,” Hecate acknowledged. “It just seems like a lot of trouble for nothing. It’s not like I have a girlfriend or this changes anything about me, and I can hardly think of what they’ll say.” Hecate squeezed her eyes shut, shuddering at the thought of her white Republican father finding out his daughter was a lesbian. Her parents had not even given her a talk on the birds and the bees, for God’s sake. That thankless task had fallen to her oldest sister, Sloane. Sexuality had always felt like such a taboo in the prim and proper Hardbroom house. You married. You procreated, and everything else, you kept to yourself. That was the Hardbroom way.
Dimity studied her knowingly. “It’s not for nothing. It’s for you. And you don’t need a girlfriend or anyone else to claim who you really are.” She added gently, repeating for good measure, “And we’re here for you, you know, for whenever you feel ready.”
Hecate wanted to toss back that that was all fine and good for Dimity to say when she had Julie Hubble to go home to, but she bit her tongue on the spiteful reflex. She knew Dimity had not had an easy time of it. Not unlike now, the aughts had not been kind to those who were black and queer. Devout Baptists, Dimity’s parents had kicked her out when she first came out as a teen, fearing ostracization by the church, and her situation had been touch-and-go until she had been taken in by her grandmother. A no-nonsense woman of faith, Granny Drill, had been firm in her convictions even then, “No grandchild of mine will be on the street.” Dimity was far braver than she, a grown woman in her thirties, who still had not come out to her family.
With an inward wince, Hecate changed the subject, “I love this scene.” It was a testament to how well Dimity knew her that she let her. Hecate was done talking about this for today, and besides, they both knew there would be waterworks arriving, as if on cue, in just a few short minutes.
Judy Garland’s voice crooned through the screen.
Once again, as in olden days
Happy golden days of yore
Faithful friends who are dear to us
Will be near to us once more
Someday soon, we all will be together
If the fates allow
Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now
Hecate really did love this scene. She did not know if it was the wistfulness of Judy Garland as Esther Smith, decked out in her iconic red dress, her face framed by that glittering shawl in the moonlight, as she sang her bittersweet rendition of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” Hecate’s favorite version if she was pressed, or a young Margaret O’Brien as Tootie, trembling in her nightgown beside her, tears silently pooling in her eyes before the young girl dashed out of the room to massacre the snow people erected on the lawn, her all-too-overwhelming sorrow channeled into that tiny figure and a child’s impotent rage.
But this scene in Meet Me in St. Louis got her every single time. No matter how many times she had seen this movie, every year without fail, her hand would clutch at her aching heart as Esther knelt in the snow to console her angrily sobbing sister, and tonight was no exception. Her voice thickening with sadness, Esther exhorted, almost desperately, “But the main thing, Tootie, is that we’re all going to be together. Just like we’ve always been. That’s what really counts. We could be happy anywhere as long as we’re together.”
Muddling through, that was Hecate in a nutshell. To be fair, on paper, Hecate was thriving. She had her own apartment. She was a journalist for a reputable publication. She had money in the bank. She had found her people, at long last. And all that meant that she was finally able to live her life on her own terms. She was dating … and dating women, or at least as much as she wanted. After the initial frightening exhilaration, she had learned the dating game could be both fun and grueling in its grind. She had not yet found The One, but that felt like a blip, a childish idea she had long outgrown anyway. It was too simplistic, and the odds seemed almost fantastically long. Lies spouted by Big Marriage, she and Dimity would snicker, and a little too rigidly heteronormative for her liking. But that aside, Hecate was living every dream of her closeted teenage self. Independent from her parents’ wealth for over a decade now, she was free to be herself, her authentic prickly, queer, sappy, confident self. And if she still felt a bit of a fraud, especially when she visited home for the holidays, falling back into old childhood patterns long left behind, then it was a small cross to bear for the freedom to be herself the rest of the year.
She did not even know why she liked this movie. None of it reflected her life. The Hardbrooms were no Smiths, even on their best days. There were no older sisters wiping away her tears, despite her having two. And not one of them would claim that the Hardbrooms would be happy anywhere as long as they were together. The Hardbrooms were of the camp that absence made the heart grow fonder. With every Christmas, all the scattered Hardbroom children would make the annual, obligatory trek home, and for a few interminable days, happy smiles would be pasted on happy faces. That was the whole point, after all, for those beaming, picture-perfect smiles to be printed out for glossy pamphlets stuffed into mailers and sent to prospective voters throughout the district. But it made her Christmas movie rotation every year, nonetheless.
And happy golden days of yore. What happy golden days? At the sardonic thought, a familiar face flashed painfully through her mind before she could blink the image away. And faithful friends. She felt a sharp twisting in her heart. Well, those were long past too.
At her muffled sniffle, Dimity teased, “You’re such a softie, HB.”
Hecate shushed her bashfully, dabbing at her damp eyes, “Don’t tell anyone.”
At that, Dimity only chuckled, squeezing her tighter, “Don’t tell anyone? It’s the worst-kept secret around.”
Hecate knew it. There was a reason Mildred Hubble called her “Miss Softbroom” when she joined their movie nights, her tears inevitable. Even Elf made her cry.