Last midsummer...

[lyra_silver]

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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[subtle-will.livejournal.com]

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_silver]

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.

[subtle-will.livejournal.com]

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?"

[lyra_silver]

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.

[subtle-will.livejournal.com]

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_silver]

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.