Author's Note: Written for Ria in the Yuletide 2007 challenge. Someone said that it ended everything with suspicious convenience, and it's true that this came into my head as a first chapter to another project, but it works just as well as a stand-alone ending for Will and Lyra. Feel free to read it either way. :)
Disclaimer: I own nothing related to His Dark Materials; the characters in the following fic belong to Philip Pullman.
from our seasons here
Will is forty when he sees an angel again.
He sees her in the middle of the park, standing straight and tall and alone. At once he knows her for what she is; and from the dull pearl of her skin and the way she holds herself, she is clearly not pretending to be human.
He does not hurry. Age has slowed him as he had never thought it would. He does not dare to think of the hope that surges in his chest at her nearness, the transparency of her existence, and what it might mean.
Kirjava leaps into his arms and presses close. Her tiny bones tremble against his heart in a rhythm which says a single name over and over again. They do not speak to each other. The only words which can be uttered hold them fast in silence.
"Will Parry," the angel says when he has come close enough to hear her. "Do you know me?"
He looks at her closely but sees nothing to recognise: the only female angel he has ever known is Xaphania, and this is not she. "No," he says.
"Good," she says. "Then there is nothing to stand between your mind and your lesson."
He laughs. It's a happy sound, for he has led a good life, one of laughter and pride and occasional battles (because what is life without struggle?) Even so, there is something too sharp about it. In his arms, Kirjava is narrowing her eyes silkily at the stranger. "And what have you come to teach me?"
"I did not say that you would be taught," the angel says. "You know all that you need. But you are old enough now to understand what you know. There are things you would have wanted which you could not have grasped when you were younger which are now within your reach. I am here to tell you that they are."
"Like what?"
"Think. What is the thing you want most?"
An answer leaps onto his tongue. He suppresses it. He has learned caution, and that first instinctual response is among the things he is not permitted to desire, lest it destroy his life with the wanting of it. "Why are you asking me?" he demands instead.
"You are not looking for questions, but their answers," the angel says sharply. "Think."
He closes his eyes, gives in. "I want to see Lyra again."
It is the first time that he has said her name in years. At first because it was easier to be happy without thinking of her, without imagining how she would respond to this movie or that joke. Then, later, because it had become habit - because, even as the wounds faded, the name still stirred a fresh wave of fury and terror and utter loss in his heart.
How ridiculous it is to think that the years have dimmed nothing, but they haven't. He loves her still, with all the helpless passion that he has ever had.
"The ways are open," the angel says. He thinks that there is something remarkably calculating about how she speaks, as if she's measuring out each word to test the response they rouse in him. "You can learn to pass through them, to see her again."
"Would I be able to come back?"
"Does it matter? Would you not abandon this life for love?"
Will lifts his head. His sharp eyes stay level; his voice does not change from evenness. "You're asking me for a different answer to the same choice we made all those years ago," he says. He rests three fingers on Kirjava's fur; she is watching the angel with the slinking serenity of a predator stalking prey. "We can't be allowed to choose ourselves over the world. It matters."
"If you learn to do it correctly," the angel says, "you will be able to travel back and forth at your will."
"What is the price?"
"You have already paid it, Will Parry. You have spent years in service to your cause, striving after that faraway goal, and never thought of what your reward might be. The woman called Mary Malone has taught you part of it, though neither of you understood precisely what you were doing. You have all the necessary skills; now is only the time to bring them into focus."
"How?"
"It is not something that can be taught," the angel says again. He thinks that she sounds irritated now, if angelically so, "only learned. You must do it yourself."
He concentrates, but even before it begins he knows it's hopeless. He hasn't even the faintest idea where to begin. Does he pretend to make another cut in the air with his hands? Does he picture a door to step through it? In his mind he's casting about for the thousand places where she might be: at the top of the pyramids in South America, in the North, speaking gravely to a ring of panserbjorn. She could be anywhere in the world, and without the focus of a place to which he can travel, how can he guess where to go?
Kirjava whispers into his ear, remembering as he remembers, "Xaphania told you about it, just before we left. It's a form of imagining. You don't need to think of places. Just imagine Lyra."
So, under the angel's heavy stare, he closes his eyes again to think of her: not as she was, but as she must be now. What comes to him is not sight, however, but a series of impressions. He cannot think of how she must look, but he can imagine her laughter ringing out, her hands tight in his, the sweat and gleam of her eyes after dancing. And a thousand other impressions that he could have never gleaned from memory alone: her scent coming in from rain (damp, earthy), her sandy hair burning black in the desert sunshine, her favorite way of eating a forkful of spaghetti.
It turns in his mind like a key.
Xaphania was wrong: it is nothing like seeing. It is the click that Will has always felt between studying the x-rays and his diagnosis - between listening to a professor in university and feeling the rightness of the answer settle into his bones as a chemistry problem comes abruptly clear. It is partly how he holds Kirjava when this world barely acknowledges that she exists. It is understanding, but it runs deeper than that: a grasp of the world which, in coming clear, undoes the walls which bound what you thought you understood and looses a great and terrible change...
It is both easier than he thought it would be, and more difficult than he could have ever imagined.
He blinks and finds himself standing in the middle of a street at night. The wind whips coldly about him; winter jitters down his spine. When he lifts his head he cannot see the stars for the towers and the fog. Kirjava drops from his arms to prowl about him. The scene is both familiar and unfamiliar all at once, and there is a sense that something terrible and great is coming.
"It will grow easier as time goes on," the angel says, cool as evening. "You have done very well for a first attempt."
His voice when he speaks is shaking. "Where am I?" he asks, but he already knows the answer. It is only that he dares not think of it, that he does not dare to speak the words aloud, as if the ground might dissolve beneath his very feet at the thought of what could be true.
He turns to the angel, who has come through the passage unscathed and utterly radiant. "Do you know where she is?" he demands.
"She was to learn the same things that you did."
Will considers this, then yells with laughter. And at the same time, there is a cry from down the street. "Will?"
"Lyra!"
The lamps flicker, and then a shadow is flying out of the darkness to crash into him, an angel soaring up behind her. She lifts her hands too fast and her knuckles bang against his chin, and it's clumsy and graceless and still nothing changes the fact that she is solid and frozen and flush against him, still Lyra after all these years. Lyra the same as she has ever been: her dark hair tangled and her eyes alight. Not precisely as he remembers her -- she's older with all the accoutrements of the years: a faded scarred line across one temple, a certain lowness of the voice. But her face is the same, and the pulse hammering beneath her throat, and the way she smiles, fierce and desperate, every time.
There's a little awkwardness, as between adults who have not seen each other for years, but it rapidly melts until it's only her lips and his, clinging together with all the comfort of long years together.
They stand and kiss for a long moment before she breaks away and hits him over the head. "You idiot," she chokes out. Pantalaimon and Kirjava are twining about each other, rolling like mad cats and batting at each other playfully in the street. "I went to your world and looked for you and you weren't there, you'd already gone... I had to hurry back, I thought I'd miss you, I thought you'd--"
"No," he says dizzily, "no, I'd never leave without seeing you--" They're kissing again. The night is blind and clear and empty of everything but Lyra, familiar and dear in his arms.
Somewhere between kisses the angels have disappeared: they are only two pairs of crazed adults and daemons, alone on a cobblestone street.
When they come up for air again, she clutches at him. Her hands are beginning to burn with cold. "Here," he says, "let me--" and he rubs her fingers between his palms, but it does not matter; he is as cold as she is. They meet each other's eyes and start, helplessly, to laugh. They are freezing and badly-dressed and it doesn't matter. Nothing matters but this.
They are together.
Then what we endlessly separate,
merely by being, comes together. Then at last
from our seasons here, the orbit
of all change emerges.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke, The Fourth Elegy.