Chapter Text
Lyra lay in the dark with her heart pounding. It was the middle of the night, and the other girls in her dorm were long asleep and would be until after dawn broke; all silent save for a shift here, a murmur there, a soft snore, a deep and heavy exhale. But Lyra could hear nothing but her own pounding heart. It hammered under the skin of her chest, flushed and damp from the heady heat of June; of the night before Midsummer Day five years after the very first.
And so there were five thick envelopes under her pillow, the alethiometer beside them. One letter for every Midsummer Day. One letter for every year. She had first begun to write when, two days after her first Midsummer, she had been seized in the middle of the night, a night much like this one, with the terror that she would forget everything and have nothing to tell the Harpies and that she would forget to tell Will everything that had happened to her: all the late nights with her nose in a book, studying geography and theology and Dust and the alethiometer, all the times she saw a tall boy with black hair and her heart sped up and she would nearly call out Will's name but it wouldn't be him because of all the impossible things in all the worlds there ever were, that one was the most impossible.
Each envelope was stuffed with thick sheaves of papers and the odd photogram: her visits to Svalbard, odd facts she learned and everything anyone could possibly know about Dust. She had pages full of things as mundane as the weather, the visits of the Gyptains and the bricklayers of Jordan College. She even talked about the girls she went to school with and how they sat about, how they studied together, had their hearts broken by Oxford boys, and taught Lyra how to braid her hair. In the third letter, there were four whole pages in small handwriting about everything she had learned about Stanislaus Grumman from the witches, from the people of the North, from any book or clipping she could find, from anyone who would tell her. There were two more pages in the fourth letter.
Her letters were filled to the brim with things she wanted to tell him but couldn't because he was worse than far away from her. He was so impossibly close that there were times Lyra imagined that, had they been in the very same world, she would have passed right by him. The sensation always left her breathless, as if something vital were being pulled right out of her. Serafina Pekkala told her to stop tracing every route she had been with Will in his Oxford, but Lyra didn't care those first couple years. All she had wanted was Will; his rare smile, his straight black brows, the sound of his voice.
Lyra's heart was thumping loudly now for two reasons: tomorrow was Midsummer's day and she would try again, this year harder than she had ever tried, to gather enough Dust, to wish and love harder than ever, so that maybe, maybe if she could not ever see him, they might still thin the barrier between their worlds enough to get a stack of letters through. The second was a different sort of anticipation, one that came over her and burned through her when the pain of absence subsided long enough for the memory of touch to ebb in.
With the tips of her fingers and toes nearly humming, she remembered the ghost of Will's hands, down to his two missing fingers. Lyra chastised herself often for not having a better imagination, but she prided herself on how sharp her memory had become. There - there were his lips soft and reverent, peppering her cheek, down her jaw, evolving into lazy and hungry kisses down the column of her throat. And there, a graze of the teeth in the hollow of her collarbone and the smell of his hair against her cheek.
Had she been the girl she was even five years younger, she would have howled from the unfairness of it. A glimpse of him, she would beg the universe, beg Grace, beg Dust, a word, the sound of his breathing, a scent, whisper. Anything. Anything at all. It had taken her a year to ask the alethiometer: is he safe?
Yes.
Another year to ask: will I ever see him?
With trying, Lyra had thought it said. Then, half a year: how can I talk to him?
Summer dust, the alethiometer had answered unhelpfully, then the needle swung and stopped on the hourglass with the skull, and swung and stopped there again. Lyra had never hated anything more than that alethiometer in that moment. She had wept and raged and spoken to no but Pantalaimon for days after running off to the Gyptains. If not for Ma Costa and Farder Coram she never would have come back to school. She never would have touched that alethiometer again and she never would have learned that the two swings meant two years, and not two deaths, and that summer dust meant the Dust between them on Midsummer, and not the dust in the grove of the world of the mulefa, the dust of all the souls of the dead.
It was too hot beneath her quilt and sheets and too cold above them. Her feet felt as if they were burning, but when she stuck them out they felt too odd and exposed.
"I wish there was a breeze," Pan said softly in her ear. He was splayed upon his back beside her, his tail tickling her ear.
"I wish I could sleep," Lyra replied. "I wish..."
"I know," said Pan. "I do too."
"Everything reminds me of him. Everything. It's agony," Lyra said in a whisper, her voice breaking. She felt the prick of tears. Pan flicked his tail in her face and Lyra gave a reluctant chuckle when he kept swatting her, fur going up her nose. "You're right, you're right," sighed Lyra. "No use making us miserable. It en't going to change a thing."
It wouldn't do to cry that night. In the hours before dawn, Lyra drifted fitfully to sleep with all of her blankets tossed off, only her sheet around her knees and her nightgown hopelessly twisted. Just as the sun was rising she half woke again to find herself almost cold, and pulling her blanket over her shoulder, she found herself happy. Pan was curled at her neck and his fur rustled once with a delighted shiver; he, like Lyra, was remembering the feel of Will's hand on his fur.
Midmorning came and Lyra woke with the summer sun streaming in her eyes. Her stomach was in knots with excitement and unceasing worry. With her hands cold and shaky she put on her stockings and the blue walking dress that had been her mother's.
"Well?" she asked Pantalaimon. Lyra smoothed the front the best she could and straightened her collar.
"You look nice," he replied, settling on her shoulder. Will would not be able to see her while they spent their hour together on that bench, but Lyra dressed her best in spite of all of it. Her mother might have been proud. Lyra even combed her hair out of habit and washed her face and wore Mrs. Coulter's dresses on special occasions from a trunk that had been delivered to her on her sixteenth birthday. They were still loose around her hips and chest, but it was all Lyra had when it came to dresses, and all Lyra had when it came to her mother.
"I hardly recognize me. You suppose Will's going to?"
"He's Will," Pantalaimon reminded her, "Don't be silly."
The last letter she'd written had a photogram of her tucked inside, just to make sure he'd still know her. Lyra knew she would give anything to have a photogram of Will. He would be old enough to have a beard now, and would look more and more like his father.
"One day I'll be tired of you being right."
"You won't," he sniped back, and Lyra tugged on his ear for being smug.
"This year it'll work," Lyra said, sounding tense even to her ears.
"And if it doesn't?" Pan asked, as anxious as Lyra.
"We wait another year."