Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

this horror will grow mild, this darkness light (ii.220)

It festers.

When Mary returns to Oxford—her Oxford—she carries a wound. The seeds and the amber lens gifted by Atal almost makes it worse, like pressing on a bruise: sharp, compulsive, a relief. So she knows how it festers. But she’s helped by the truth that it’s not the first time she’s had to lance her grief. 

That golden night in Lisbon, with the nutty marzipan lingering on her lips; her lost love, her new love, and the Church which, yes, she also loved, all swirling in a maelstrom. That was grief, and hope, and healing, all at once. Mary’s wounds—her scars—they’ve never left her, but they’ve changed her into the person she wanted, and needed to be. How else could she have guided dear Lyra and Will to such a gift?

First love is an uncertain love, a love that seems more fragile than a strand of silk. Mary will take no credit for its weaving, but she knows that it is through her truth that Will and Lyra found the courage to grasp that fruit of love. She’s proud of it, as well as the rest, the mulefa and reclaiming of dust, of understanding the universe and life’s place within it far beyond what studying in the Cave could give her. But she knows she also made the knife cut deeper.

And Will doesn’t yet have the gift of years. In that blistering return, with questions about both of their disappearances, the health of Will’s mother, and, oh God, Mary’s destroyed supercomputer—she knows it’s trivial, but she practically lived in the Cave—it’s easy to overlook, to look past. Will has Kirjava, and what could be a better aid in healing a broken soul than being able to talk with it? Mary’s own daemon is a balm in ways she could never have thought possible.

Mary forgets that Will and Kirjava are broken in the same places, by the same person.

Their wound? It festers.

II.

Elaine was saved when Will returned. Will’s return saved Elaine. Will saved her.

Will—her proud, beautiful boy—has been home for Elaine since he was born. Home was whatever Will made safe for her, first as a babe with joy enough to repel any demon, and then with careful attention and focus. When Will was born, a wolf took up residence in her heart. It whined, and beg, and fought, and after John disappeared, howled its lonesome cry into her ribcage and up into her throat. All it was and all it did was helpless love for her child. Even with John’s letters—the coordinates, the explanations—the wolf wouldn’t let Elaine abandon Will, to give up the secret, because there were enemies everywhere.

Elaine knows, because Will, and Mary, and her psychiatrist have all been firm about it, that she should try not to entertain these fears… She’s working on it. And while it has gotten better, she now fears that she must save Will, and she doesn’t know how.

At first, she didn’t really notice the danger, because when Will came back, she had gone to live in a care facility, which was… hard on both of them. Mary had helped, picking up all the pieces of child-raising that Elaine was incapable of. Will had visited her every day, but those visits only gave a glimpse, and Will was still working so hard to be her home.

And once they started living together again, Will was careful to hide it. He never liked talking about the other worlds, and Mary quickly habituated herself to eliding her experiences—for the sake of her grants, everything had to be kept very theoretical. Elaine doesn’t like thinking about it either, not only because it worries her psychiatrist, who believes it another symptom. Will had told her the truth,or some version of the truth: There was a war, a war that her John was fighting. In wars, people die. There was a girl. There was salvation, or some type of it. For some people.

She doesn’t know all of it. She knows the important bits, but she thinks even Will doesn’t know all of it. Or maybe that’s not right: maybe it’s that he doesn’t understand of all it. Understanding is so fleeting for Elaine. She… drifts. Maybe she passed it on. Regardless, it’s difficult to understand a childhood that you have not yet left.

But every day, she sees it more and more. Will is fighting his own wolf—a fight that is costing him everything. It doesn’t show easily—he’s getting good marks in school, preparing for his A Levels, but…

After John left, Elaine knows she got worse. More scared of the world, ruled by that urge to retreat. Will seems to be retreating the same way. Not exactly like her, because Elaine retreated to her home, to her child, to a safe place. Will doesn’t need that home. Instead, he retreats into himself. He still engages: he has tea with Mary, he visits her lab, he makes Elaine breakfast each day. But he doesn’t seem to let himself care about the world. Will used to play adventure in the garden. He used to dream of saving people, of saving John. But now, he seems to treat the whole world as an obstacle to get through. His studies are a lifeline that he is spilling out to himself.

And Kirjava—the impossibility!—is standoffish. Sure, she’s a cat. That’s what cats are like! That’s what Will is like. Will is Kirjava, after all. But cats… they still want to be loved. Elaine has only rarely seen Kirjava and Will touch. She doesn’t know what’s normal. It seems strange.

And… Elaine is selfish. She needs Will. Will saved her. And as Elaine watches Will work on maths homework in the office after dinner, she is struck by the horrible awareness that while Will loves her, he doesn’t need her anymore. He hasn’t needed her since his journey. It’s the natural course of child-rearing that eventually, they don’t need their parents. But Elaine still needs Will. That’s horrible, right? It’s supposed to be the reverse.

Elaine tries—she’s always been trying, and she doesn’t understand why, if she wants to be there for Will, and she’s trying to be there…why it isn’t enough. She encourages him to restart boxing, or take a girl on a date. She’s only been successful on encouraging him to focus on school, but she hardly thinks she’s the cause of his scholarship. Elaine… she isn’t well. Will studies physics like it’s his only ticket out.

Maybe it is. Maybe Will’s trying to get out from her.

Or maybe get to her.  

Chapter Text

III.

Lyra never would’ve guessed that building a Republic of Heaven would be so hard.

Sure, it’s not quite like she’s really doing much, yet. She’s still in school, having finally moved from the girl’s school to the women’s college last fall, and she’s throwing herself with wild abandon into the more rigorous environment of undergraduate work.  But St. Sophia’s, liberatory as it is, still operates under the auspices of the Magisterium.

God is dead, along with his top lieutenants, and still the Magisterium trundles along. Just a couple of weeks ago, Dame Hannah told Lyra about the newest edict from Geneva, which while sounding quite innocuous, did nothing more than severely restrict grant funding for women’s colleges.

Lyra laughs. After all she’s been through, she’s complaining about the church’s grant process? If—well, if Mary was around, she’s sure they would have a rollicking conversation about all the injustices of academic funding. But she’s not. And neither is Will. And meanwhile, the Muscovites and the Witch Clans have hurtled headfirst into a new war, spurred by the Imperial Guard’s need to prove its loyalty to the ever-more-mercurial church. Lyra hasn’t heard from Serafina in over a year. Sisters! Ha!

She’s being uncharitable, she knows. Serafina has responsibilities, and Lyra doesn’t. But even Pan seems like he’d like nothing more than to divest himself from her entirely. It’s only the risk of seeming unnatural that keeps him by her side each day, but in the night, he’s as likely as not to wander across the roofs and through the grounds, a perverse retelling of Lyra’s childhood, an eccentric comet. She’s lucky she doesn’t have a roommate, or a lady’s maid, like some of the girls. 

She’s lucky about a lot of things, really. That she still has the alethiometer, for one thing, even if it’s been just as impenetrable as it was 4 years ago. She’s successfully asked it a couple of questions—pouring through the symbology books, trying to assemble the levels of meaning that used to come so naturally. Well, successfully might be a strong word—she’s asked, but she hasn’t always understood the answers.

Lyra’s pretty sure, for example, that to ask a question like “What type of daemon did the first head of Sophia’s have” (alethiometrists are encouraged to ask easily verifiable questions early in their training) that she should point towards the Alpha and Omega (the first), the Candle (leader in darkness), the Owl (for learning), and the Bird (for daemon). But the answer she got was of the Tree, the Babe, and the Lute, and she doesn’t see how that means the daemon was a shrew.

She’s tried to ask if Serafina (the Beehive) of the witches (the Bird) was still living (The Hourglass, obviously). The Marionette as the answer seemed simple, but what if she was asking the question wrong? Serafina could equally be the Angel, the Thunderbolt, or the Moon. Xaphania wasn’t lying when she said that reattaining grace in the study of the alethiometer would take a lifetime. The biggest grace Lyra’s had is resisting the urge to throw the stupid thing out a window.

Lyra has another question that she’d like answered… but she’s waiting ‘til she can be sure of her understanding. It’s a question she wants to get right on the first try. Until then, she tries to stay content with her appointment each Midsummer. Those noontime visits are hard. Each one, hard in its own way.

The first one, Lyra had felt hardly removed from the whole experience, as if no time had passed since they had left each other’s embrace, since she had last felt his lips on hers. That kiss—Oxford wasn’t the same place, having kissed a boy like that. There was a new dimension to life, to other people, that must have been there all along, but had been entirely invisible to Lyra. Her townie friends, or especially the undergraduate students: there was a new magnetism to them. Put like that, Lyra seemed to be some blushing maiden, but, when speaking slyly—or brashly—with her friends about the boys who were turning into men, she could feel the color rising in her cheeks. And at night, sometimes, her dreams… So it was, paradoxically, that Midsummer was both so close and so far removed from her adventures with Will—as if no time had passed, but the whole world changed.

The second was bitter. Lyra had been back for in her world over a full year, and her time in the other worlds had curdled in her stomach. Pan was like a comet around a Sun, or maybe vice versa. Either way, they had swung close to each other for a fleeting moment after their return, and now were rushing away. At the time, though, it seemed less like an orbit, with its known period and then return, and more like a mad dash of a boulder down a mountain, never to return. She went to the botanical garden, fuming. Pan made his way by another path. Lyra was mad at herself, at Pan, at the angels, at the world. At Will most of all, and she had spent the first 30 minutes of that noon in an inchoate rage. But as she sat there, on one side of that bench, imagining his imperfect hand in hers, at the unjustness of it all, the rage broke. Not into acceptance, or self-reflection or anything silly like that, just into empty bitterness.

That whole year was bitter. So bitter, that when the third anniversary rolled around Lyra thought seriously about not going. She kept herself busy that morning, had a late breakfast with the Master (Pan attended, under protest), and was resolutely counting down the minutes to noon with no particular attention. Will would be getting out of one of those horseless carriages, going through the gate, sitting down at his bench, in his world, under his sun, and Lyra was running pell-mell down High Street. She couldn’t miss it; how could she have even considered it? Missing Will, the only time they could ever be even slightly in each other’s company, and in that state missing each other even more? It was more necessary than breathing.

It was after that third appointment that Lyra began to tell the other girls that she had loved a boy, once. That she never really stopped loving that boy. They didn’t really understand, mostly because Lyra clammed up and refused to give them any more details, but that was both typical for Lyra and not an important barrier for her friends. Telling others broke some dam inside of her, and that summer her dreams were of bodies, and heat, and pressure, and feelings so big Lyra hardly knew what to call them. Lyra’s love was still burning in her chest, making her pulse pound and her heart ache in time—like her heart was beating itself to bruises.

So, she had spent the whole year thinking about Will when she had sat down for their fourth Midsummer meeting. Thinking about his hands, his fierce eyes, his shy smile, peaking up from the lake in the Mulefa’s world, about the sweet astringent smell of crushed grass, the nuttiness of the seed pod oil on their skin. The setting sun, lighting their skin in ochre and burnt saffron. The cool night rains, drowning the world outside the diving bell sketched by their fire.

Raindrops against her hands had made Lyra flinch. It was a cloudless day. She couldn’t understand the fact of her tears. They seemed an impossibility—a transmigration of the love inside her to some physical reality. Will was outside her reach, and they promised—she had made them promise to build a new republic, a new world. Pan, who was in one of his close periods, tucked his warm face against her neck.

This whole pain, this Abrahamic sacrifice of that whole love, it was all in pursuit of that new republic of heaven. For the first time since it became a mystery to her, Lyra immersed herself in the study of the alethiometer.

Dame Hannah had given her a graduation present, a book called Semiotics of Truth—while technically banned by the Magisterium, the internecine struggles in Geneva allowed a small press in Constantinople to do a limited run.

The progress Lyra made—an impossibility just a couple of years before, and a grim warning of how much life it would yet take to gain any mastery. Even more impossible: Lyra could unwrap the velvet cloth, and gaze upon its golden arms, and not be seized by the desperate need to ask it about—about him. The need was there, but tempered. It was a relief, but also a kind of betrayal.

And now, Lyra can tell with every new tulip reaching its hands above the earth that her next midsummer is fast approaching. Oxford in springtime is a vibrant, green city. Students of all ages and genders get overly optimistic about the first signs of sunny days and warm weather and stretch themselves across lawns and benches despite the chill. Pan is heading towards the outer limits of their irregular orbit, but even with that, the optimism is catching.

The Magisterium, with its stone halls and cells, its great machinery of oppression—maybe a spring has come to it, too. Growing roots break rock and foul machinery. And if the plants aren’t working fast enough, well, that’s what Lyra is training for: to throw some (metaphorical) wrenches and perhaps a couple of (“metaphorical”) explosives down the church’s maw.

Will: Lyra knows she’ll never stop thinking of him. But she can save it, for those Midsummer days, or those dark nights where the forces of the church seem unassailable. It can be the ember keeping her own personal revolution alive. Ever-burning. And while Lyra isn’t confident in getting a meaningful answer out of the alethiometer yet, she knows it will come. She’s the lucky one—at least she can wait for an answer. Will never can.

So, on June 25^th, Lyra has lunch with another St. Sophie’s 1^st year, and they spend the afternoon walking down Castle Mills Stream, to the Oxpens. Lyra thinks about her friend’s complaints on upcoming finals, about the summer sunlight, about Pan’s simple enjoyment of the riverbank. And for that after golden afternoon—of nothing else.

Chapter Text

Will sometimes dreams of Lyra. It’s been five Midsummers since they last saw each other, but Will’s subconscious mind is a cruel yoke. It’s made her a touch older—taller, with longer hair and a sharper face. She’ll be in lessons with some doddering tutor, or poring over a book full of alethiometer meanings, or simply lying, sunlit, on the quad of her Jordan College, Pan curled by her side. 

It’s cruel because it feels so real—like Will is peering through the worlds to catch a fleeting glimpse. When he wakes, Will feels something carving through his sternum, red hot and howling. Kirjava yowls too, and frantically wraps herself around him, her claws digging into his skin, and they cling through the horrible feeling of your world flying apart. He doesn’t know why it’s always a fresh pain—as fresh as when it first started.

Eventually, they must get up. Will is deep into his second year at his Oxford, reading for Physics, as if he could ever study anything else. It’s fine. Takes up a lot of his time, which can be nice. Mary is a great help, and inspiration. He enjoys any tutorial with her to a lecture with his professors. This is helped by the fact that, while Mary has retreated from work on the many-worlds theory, she is still enthralled by shadow-particles, and she’s even had some decent success with some of the grounding theory behind a conscious Dust. Science moves slow, she would say, so I’m letting them acclimate to it. 

Will asked her once, soon after he was accepted into Oxford, why she stopped pursuing the many-worlds theory. Mary had sighed, put down the journal article that she had been using to gesticulate her way through a litany of complaints on Oliver—that backwards, blind, and bungling ignoramus! and looked at Will. 

“There’s a lot of reasons,” she said.

“Which ones mattered?”

“Well, there’s the scientific ones. You know, the challenges of publishing, of falsifiability—”

“What about the other ones?” 

“Will—” She paused, considering. “You know the stakes. You know the rules. One doorway. One leak.” 

“Rules from spirit—not from matter. Isn’t physics the study of matter?”

Mary sighed, again. “Will, you know this separation, it isn’t about a—a punishment. And my focus on dust, your happy life, they aren’t a reward for—for forgetting her. For forgetting something that matters. This is about healing. It’s about a choice.”

Will had stood up, an arresting movement in Mary’s small office, with his height. “And what if my choice was—” and stopped, stricken. Mary stared back. 

The next time they had seen each other, at a weekend dinner with Elaine, they both made the silent resolution to bury the conversation.  

That was over a year ago, and Will’s courses had finally begun to expand beyond the staid elementary physics and maths of his first year. Not fast enough, though. That’s why he’s rushing to an early meeting with Mary. Mary’s office is in the same building as her old Dark Matter Research Group was, but while they and The Cave 3.0 are up on the third floor, Mary’s “new” office is in the basement. And windowless. 

Either way, it’s a 15-minute walk from his dorm down near the stream. Will’s hoping that Mary can help him get into a graduate-level seminar with a professor who has been unreceptive to Will’s emails.

Kirjava has come along—which was atypical for his university experience, but normal for a meeting with Mary. Will is odd enough without having an apparently anti-social cat following him around everywhere, so he’s generally thankful that Kirjava can instead take naps back on his bed while he’s out at class. Just his luck, then, that Sebastian, who frequently sits near him in his Classical Mechanics lecture, appears outside of the Department. Will quickly ducks down the path leading to the side door for Mary’s building.  Outside of Mary’s office, he raps his knuckles against the door frame and lets himself in. 

Mary looks up from her communion with a mug of tea dark enough to be coffee. “Will!” she says, pleased, “and your better half! What brings you both by so early?” Her daemon, invisible to those without them, drops down to murmur with Kirjava. 

“Can’t I just drop by to visit?” Will responds. Wrong move: now he has her attention. Will hasn’t been one to just drop by, the past couple years. While Will is thankful beyond measure for Mary, their relationship isn’t all smooth sailing. Will and Mary—well, Will doesn’t know exactly why. He tries not to think about it. 

He sits down, pulling a syllabus from his bookbag. “I was wondering,” he begins, “if you might be able to put in a word for me with Professor Evelyn Wang on her String Theory and Branes seminar.”

Mary leans back, mug in hands. “Will.”

“I know it’s a graduate seminar, and it’s unusual—”

“Will.” 

“—for a second year, but it’s one of my interests, and I’m sure I’ll do well—”

“Will, you were just talking to me last week about your trouble in math models—”   

“I can work hard,” Will says, affronted. 

Mary sighs. She seems to do that a lot around Will. “It’s not a question of your work ethic. God knows you can put in the work. Or at least I know.”

“So what’s the issue?”

 “Will, I’m worried for you,” Mary says.

“I can take care of myself.”

“When was the last time you spent time with friends?  I know you can make them, you’re quite charming when you want to be. Gone out to the pub? Or even the last time you studied with a classmate, instead of me?”

He keeps silent. Kirjava watches, eyes lidded, from her perch on a pile of old textbooks. 

“I don’t mean to fret, truly.” Mary turns her mug in her hands. “But,” she pauses, fretfully, “you hardly even seem to like physics. I mean, sure, you can plow through a problem set like the best of them, but—"

“Mary, this is my choice. Right? It’s a choice I get to make. I’ve made it.”

“We can make the wrong choices,” she says. 

“Wrong choices? Wrong bloody choices?” Will snaps. Kirjava leaps down from her perch. He guesses they’re having it out. “Don’t tell me—don’t lecture me about wrong choices.” There’s a buzzing in his ears, and a burning in his chest.

Mary's brow wrinkles. Will busies himself with packing up his bookbag as Kirjava paces. He has the sudden, horrible suspicion that he can’t look at Mary. Can’t look at her kind eyes, at her kind face. At her understanding. What does she understand?

“I’ll reach out to Professor Wang, Will,” Mary says, “but you need to be honest with me.” Will fixes his eyes on the translucent amber lacquer on Mary’s desk. Kirjava twists herself through his legs. “Why are you studying physics? Not like anything you’ve written in applications or to professors—but actually, truly, why?”

Will shuts his eyes. “I—” he stops. “I love her.” He takes a shuddering breath. He won’t cry. “And.” He won’t. “That’s all. That’s enough.” He’s spinning to pieces. “I love her. That’s enough.”

Mary must make a sound, or something, because suddenly Will’s looking at her face—her kind face, her kind eyes, the face of a mother, and he can feel his own face cracking and contorting. Mary stands up, and comes around her desk, and her dry hand is taking his, and her slight arms are coming around his.

Mary starts, “Grief—” and pauses. “Grief, I’ve learned, is just love. It’s all the love we want to give, but cannot.” Will swallows. “All that love gathers in the corners of your eyes, and in the lump in your throat, and in the hollow of your chest.” Will is an abyss. “Grief is just love with no place to go.”

“So what do I do? Stop loving her?” Will feels like he must yell to get the words out, but they’re coming up as whispers. “I don’t want to not feel this about Lyra. And what if—?”

“It’s almost malicious—that she’s probably still alive. It’s hard to grieve someone still living, but just forever out of reach.” Mary says, as she pulls back from the hug to look Will in the face. She holds his left hand, her fingers passing through the empty space where his used to be. “But that’s what we must do. We must lay our love to rest.”   

Mary pulls him back into a hug. Will falls apart.

~~~~

The next afternoon, Will’s getting coffee. Because of yesterday’s 9 o’clock lab, he and Mary hadn’t been able to really finish their conversation, but he woke up this morning with an email from her in his inbox. He isn’t avoiding it—he just had a busy day, and now he’s getting coffee. He’ll read it later. Maybe tomorrow. He might as well finish out the term before switching anything up. 

What Mary said—it was too big to grasp all at once. He hardly knows what to do with himself. It’s almost as if he must now learn to look at the world—his world—in a new way. He chuckles to himself; imagine if Lyra could see him now. It en’t like you haven’t done it already! But—

“—Hey, Will! Haven’t seen you here often!” says Sebastien, stamping the snow off his boots as he comes into the café. Underneath his woolen hat, the tips of his tightly coiled hair are newly bleached blonde. 

“Ah, yeah. Hi.” Will never knows what to say around Sebastien, who is friendly to a fault, while Will seems to retreat into his prepubescent self, awkward and standoffish. He has no idea why—Mary was right, he can be charming. He should be able to be. Sometimes. “Just, uh, getting coffee.” Will gestures, uselessly, towards the pick-up counter. 

“Yeah? Never would have guessed.” Sebastien’s eyes crinkle. Will can feel heat rising on his face. “You know, I was meaning to ask which professor you’re doing Mechanics II with next semester. Could be fun to take it together—you’re a good lecture partner.” 

“Well, uh, thanks,” Will starts, cheeks burning, and suddenly decides to commit to Mary’s suggestion, at least here, “but I don’t know if I’m going to continue with physics. Um, I mean, I might be switching tracks.” Sebastien looks genuinely crestfallen. Will feels the need to reassure him: “But you’re a good partner too. For lectures! A good lecture partner.”

Sebastion gives an exaggerated pout, and says, “Too bad, man! I was looking forward to getting to know you better.” Pause. “As a lecture partner.”  He smiles and turns to get in line. Oh. Oh. That’s what this is. Oh. 

Will’s stomach swoops. It’s not that he isn’t attractive—oh shit, Sebastien is more than attractive—it’s just that Will has spent the last 5 years trying to remove himself from the daily rhythm of life, a rhythm that seemed impossible to bear without the person who taught him how to live. Lyra. But she made him promise to live, to love. To not compare. And like Mary said, all those many years ago: We ought to live for love, not die for it. 

Will takes a breath. Small steps.

“Hey, Sebastien?”  

[...] Sleep on 

Blest pair; and O yet happiest if ye seek

No happier state, and know to know no more (book iv, lines 773-775)