lyra_silver | Last midsummer...

Last midsummer...

Today Lyra and Pantalaimon sneak out of maths class early, with a conspiratorial smile for their classmates and a quick glance at the half-blind lecturer. They cut through the University Parks, behind Gabriel College. They hurry down Holywell Street and the road curving past Magdalen, and climb over the fence of the Botanical Gardens. It's daytime and the gardens are open, of course, but Lyra feels it would be a certain kind of failure to pay the entrance fee like the tourists do. These are her gardens, after all.

Across the park, past the fountain, and back at the plainer end of the garden, just by the riverbank, the bench waits for them. It's empty. No one would dare sit on Lyra's bench, not on Midsummer's Day. Lyra runs to it and takes her seat. Pantalaimon slips up behind her just as the first set of bells begins to chime noon.

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He's tired, already.

Up since the early morning, when Mary had left for work, and it was his turn to make breakfast--a quiet meal. Will never did say much on this particular day, at least not to her, and so Mary simply sat across from him and pretended to read the morning paper, while absentmindedly stirring her tea.

And then it was to the library, to get work out of the way...no work was allowed on this day. Not today. Books and dust

(not Dust) and Kirjava making him nervous with her own impatience to be there, but Will takes his time. No hurry. No need to be there before noon.

And yet he finds himself walking the familiar paths with a quick sure stride a good quarter hour in advance, his blood singing nervously through his veins.

He pays for his ticket.

And there it is. His bench. He sits, lowers his satchel to the ground, while Kirjava weaves nervously around his ankles.

The clock chimes noon.

The bells of Oxford chime, some high, some low, some near, some far. Lyra can name them all, usually, from their distance and their pitch, Magdalen Somerville St Edmund Jordan Merton Balliol St Sophia's. Today she is not listening to them at all. She stares at the empty half of the bench. "You're there. You must be."

"They're there," Pantalaimon agrees. "We just can't see them."

Lyra sets her hand gently on the other side of the bench, where Will and Kirjava must be sitting in that other universe. "Hello, Will," she says.

"Hello, Kirjava," echoes Pantalaimon.

Will looks toward the chiming bells, and shivers a little.

"It's time," he tells Kirjava, who leaps up onto his lap and presses her front paws into his shirt, kneading it slightly.

"Do you think they're here?" she asks, sounding worried, and he nods, a little fiercely, and cautiously reaches out to where he knows--he knows--Lyra is sitting in her own world.

"Of course they're here. They just can't hear us."

Kirjava winds around and pads lightly to where the two halves of the bench meet.

"Hello, Pan," she says, so cheerfully Will's heart aches.

"Hello, Lyra," he says, a little more softly.

"We're here."

"Oh, Will."

A few children, playing some game that involves a lot of running, laughing and tagging each other, glance curiously at Lyra in passing. She ignores them.

"Oh, Will, I never know what to say, or where to start... I miss you so much. I miss you every day and every night, and I'm always thinking of things I want to tell you, but when I come here there are too many things to say and I forget. They made me a prefect, and I like my history class, and political economy is very interesting, and Iorek Byrnison invited me to visit him this summer... None of it matters, Will. I don't want to do any of it as much as I want to sit here and talk to you. And see you and hear you and touch you, and I can't."

Lyra holds Pantalaimon close, biting her lip and glaring at that empty space on the other side of the bench, as if it is the air's fault that they cannot see Will and Kirjava.

He looks down, and bites his lip.

Every year, the ache that is the Lyra-shaped spaced in his soul sharpens when he sits here. Every year that space seems just a bit emptier.

"Lyra, I miss you," he says unhappily, finally, and closes his eyes, hoping it will help him pretend that she is sitting there, bright hair flashing in the sun and laughing at him.

But it doesn't.

"Oh, Lyra. I know we promised, but I can't help feeling that we shouldn't have. Why build a Kingdom of Heaven when there isn't any Authority left to rule it? I wish I'd stayed with you, even if I'd died."

His eyes snap fiercely.

"Nothing seems to make a difference, no matter what I do. Oh, the professors like me well enough, and I'm doing well--I was moved up a year, you know." He smiles, a bit. "And Mary sends her love--well. She would. She does, I'm sure. I'm living with her now...I must have told you that. Ever since my mother died."

Kirjava sits upright on his lap, staring intently into the space next to him.

He only shakes his head.

"And there's no one--no one--no one! Every one seems so dull, when they're not you. Not fair to them, I imagine."

He chuckles, miserably.

Lyra grips the top rail of the bench until she is calm enough to speak again.

"Tell them about Milliways," Pantalaimon suggests. "That was different."

Lyra closes her eyes, thinking. "I found a place, last summer. Through a door into another universe. I hoped I'd find you there, but you weren't there, and no one had heard of you... The people were friendly. I met a girl there who--"

She breaks off, looking suddenly uncertain, afraid, and much younger than sixteen.

"It makes me wonder," he continues, steadily, "whether or not there might not be another door, another window, somewhere. As soon as I graduate--before, if I can--I'm going to travel the world, and if there is one, I'll find it. You have to to believe me, Lyra. All those worlds! Not every window could have been closed. There must be one, somewhere."

He clenches his hands into fists, his knuckles white.

Kirjava bats lightly at the air with one silky black paw, unsure.

"Oh, Pan, I hope you're taking care of Lyra," she says, and then, "I know you are. I know it. We just miss you so much."

"Well. Her name is Anthy, and she's working on her own revolution. She sounded like us, Will, like her battle and ours weren't so different... I can't explain."

Lyra's jaw tenses, and the set of her shoulders tightens, but she speaks her next words clearly. "I had to go home. I couldn't stay there. It wasn't a place to build the Republic, you know... but before I left, I kissed her, Will. She was lovely and strange and sweet, but she wasn't you. I miss her too, Will. Not as much as I miss you, not ever as much, but I miss her. I don't know if you can understand that. I'm--"

A sob breaks loose before Lyra can stifle it.

"I'm lonely here, and I'm tired of working, and fighting, and doing all of those things I have to do to build the Republic of Heaven. I wake up in the middle of the night and climb up on the Lodge Tower thinking of you, and thinking of her too, and watching the stars--"

Lyra wraps her arms around Pantalaimon and breathes jerkily to keep herself from crying any more.

She can't hear him. Not now, not ever.

I could talk myself blue in the face, he thinks, and she'd not hear a word I said.

It's that thought that kills him a little bit each summer.

"I'll find it one day," he says instead, a little too cheerfully. "You wait, Lyra. You just wait. Some day I'm going to come strolling in through a door and you and Pan will be sitting there--"

And he can just see her, biting her lip, a little older and a little wiser, but still with that same motion of pushing her hair back that he loves so dearly. He blinks, his eyes suddenly stinging, and hating the too-cheerful tone of his voice.

"And then we'll build it together. Because I don't know, oh, Lyra, I don't know. Nothing I do seems to make a difference, here, and I don't know how go about building a Republic of anything, let alone Heaven. Even Mary doesn't quite understand, I think."

Lyra rubs her eyes and defiantly pushes her hair back out of her face. "I have to think there was a reason, Will. I have to think that our work is important, that we're changing the worlds that we live in. That we need our whole, full lives to make those changes happen, and that's why we can't be together. But it makes me angry and it makes me sad."

She bites her lip again and sits up straight on the bench.

"Well. Let me tell you about Iorek. He's doing very well, and so are the bears. Of course he couldn't write me to invite me up there, but he sent a message with a witch who was coming south anyway..."

Lyra smiles, telling the story. The midsummer sky is bright blue, and there are punters passing along the Cherwell, and Will and Kirjava are there, really, just a few universes away.

He's quiet for a moment, leaning his elbows on his knees, and the sun beats down on the back of his head, and Kirjava waits patiently, only moving anxiously when she really and truly could not hold in her nerves any longer.

At length, he raises his head and there's a glint of something that is not quite stubborness in his eyes.

"I'm sorry," he says. "I'm being silly, and there's so much to tell you. Mary was promoted, after all. She's started to teach me to read the I Ching, but I'm hopeless at it. I can't understand a word. My classes are very good, although I'm sure you would tell me they're aren't as good as they are in your Oxford."

He laughs, a little, and his face softens.

"I wish you'd say hello to the witches and Iorek for me. I think of them all the time, too. Iorek must be happy to be back up North, isn't he?"

After telling Will all about Iorek and the witch who brought the message, Lyra says,

"I hope Mary Malone's well. And your mother, too. I wish I could have met her. I wish I knew someone who was going to your world so I could send you all a message the way Iorek Byrnison sent me one. I guess sitting here right now means I'm sending you a message, and I can only hope it will get to you--"

Low and sonorous, the Brasenose clock strikes one.

"Oh, Will, I love you--" Lyra calls, and Pantalaimon says, "I love you, Kirjava, I love you, I love you."

As other bells follow in quick succession, Magdalen Somerville St Edmund Jordan Merton Balliol St Sophia's, Lyra Belacqua Silvertongue bends her head over her daemon and cries.

The chime of the bells fills him with dread, and terror.

"Lyra!" he calls, uncaring of who hears him, and Kirjava leaps crying back to his breast.

"Oh, Lyra, if you can hear me at all--I'll find a way! I love you, now and forever. Always. Always."

He clutches Kirjava fiercely to him, and she cries to Pantalaimon, far of in some distant universe, calling, calling, forlorn and lost.

The last bell shivers into silence, and he shakes there, on the bench, in fury and sorrow and longing. Because now she is gone again, and this--this is as close as he will ever be able to get.

Kirjava cries against his breast, and he stands, shakily, and looks down at the other half of the bench.

"I love you," he says again, a whisper.

"Don't forget me."

Lyra wipes her eyes on the sleeve of her shirt.

She whispers, "I won't forget you, Will," to the empty bench.

Lyra and Pantalaimon trudge back northward, past the hazy spires of Magdalen, Gabriel and Durham and up to St Sophia's, in the warm Oxford afternoon.

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Last midsummer...

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