Lyra Silvertongue (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lyra_silver) wrote2005-09-19 08:56 pm
lyra_silver) wrote2005-09-19 08:56 pm
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.
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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"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.
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"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."
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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.