NOVATURIENT (adj)
desiring or seeking powerful change in one's life, behaviour or situation

i.

First, Lyra thinks it is because she will never love anyone as much as she loved Will.

She is thirteen, assisting an all-girls school and convinced she understands what love is.

Pantalaimon doesn't know what else to say or do to console her when she feels alone. Lying on her bed in St. Sophia trying not to cry so none of the girls sharing the room with her will notice. Pantalaimon no longer has words of comfort and understanding, like he hadn't loved Kirjava with every atom of himself like Lyra had loved Will.

Every atom of me, every atom of you, she said.

Some nights she dreams she kisses him again and wakes up with an ache taking on a layer of her body that isn't quite her bones or her muscles, located between her chest and throat and the back of her head.

Lyra and Pantalaimon go to the bench in the botanical garden on midsummer day, midday of midsummer day just like they agreed.

She brings the alethiometer and the books Dame Hannah allowed her to take from the library (as long as she swore they would suffer no harm). Something Dame Hannah's dæmon saw or sensed on Pantalaimon when they exchanged glances after Lyra's adamant reassurance of how careful she would be must have finally convinced them. Lyra was allowed to take the books back to her room. She probably wasn't allowed to take them off campus and bring them here, but what Dame Hannah and the librarian didn't know wouldn't hurt them.

"I miss them, Pan," she says, stopping on the page where the meanings of the chameleon start.

"Me too," says Pantalaimon, who stopped his prancing and exploring around the garden to lay down on the back of the bench.

"You don't seem to."

"To what?"

"Miss them."

He doesn't answer.

"Don't you love them anymore?"

"Of course I do, every atom."

"Every atom," Lyra echoes. "Why doesn't it feel like it?"

Pantalaimon tousles his pine marten whiskers. "I don't know."

Lyra doesn't know either. What she does know is that, deep down, she feels the same as her dæmon and that scares her very much. Because she promised. She made Will promises out of love and she didn't want to regret them lest he continued to love her with every atom and she didn't.

She can't lie about that.

ii.

When Lyra kisses Billy Costa she is fifteen and her only thought is: is this really how it felt when I kissed Will?

Billy's dæmon, Morgayne (comfortable in the form of a wolf but not yet settled), doesn't nuzzle Pantalaimon as Kirjava did. That is why, Lyra reasons, she doesn't feel anything beyond uncomfortable. Her first kiss with Will was also a lot more charged in a strange sort of ambaric energy, it drew her to him like a magnet and there was nothing of that here. (She isn't crying out of ache from separation either, which Lyra thinks is good).

"That was—" she says.

"Weird," says Billy.

Lyra nods, relieved it isn't just her.

Pantalaimon and Morgayne both chuckle.

Lyra and Billy do too.

"Let's never do that again," says Lyra.

Now, Billy nods. "Agreed."

iii.

When she kisses one of her classmates, Pauline Sorano (because Lyra thinks the fact Billy was a boy might have been a factor and, no, she doesn't think about Will), she feels awkward again.

Pauline smiles but Lyra doesn't.

Pantalaimon bumps his nose with Pauline's skunk-dæmon. An apology, with it Pauline's smile disappears.

Lyra is seventeen.

That is the last time she kisses anyone.

iv.

"Didn't we love them, Pan?" Lyra asks him at midday and three quarters on midsummer day.

With the cross pendant of the necklace Dame Hannah gave her for her birthday last year, Lyra carved WP & K on the bench. She thinks it looks like the brass plates of the skulls in Jordan's catacombs, the ones with the names of scholars and their dæmons.

She is wearing a pair of high-waisted tan coloured pants and really hates to admit Will had been right about them. Dame Hannah (who insists Lyra just call her Hannah) is working on a political campaign of some kind, Lyra isn't too immersed in the matter. She has way too much schoolwork to read the Oxford Times and the likes, she can't afford to have reading material that doesn't involve symbology. Dame Hannah's campaign started a reduced group of women wearing pants like men. So, wanting to show her support, Lyra did it too.

Pantalaimon, balancing quite awkwardly on her raised knees, says, "Of course we did."

"We won't love anyone again like we loved them will we?"

Pantalaimon flickers one of his small ears. His tail twitches almost as if he had changed shape to be a wildcat again. "No, I don't think we will."

"But we are happy, right?"

"I am, are you?"

"Yeah, I am."

v.

Would Will forgive her for forgetting about him?

First, she stopped thinking about him every day. Then, she forgot about him for days and then weeks at a time. Months. Nowadays, she remembers what fuels her nightmares more than she does him. The harpies in the Land of the Dead or leaving Pantalaimon on the dock. She would see someone named William on a text she had to read for class or someone last named Parry and suddenly remember, and feel guilty.

She wonders if he forgets about her too.

(That would make her feel less guilty).

vi.

"We don't love them less," says Pantalaimon. "We love them differently."

Lyra doesn't like those romance books Jeanette Muller loves to talk about, so her knowledge about that specific matter is limited at best. Her thirteen-year-old self would have claimed otherwise, but at nineteen Lyra knows better and at nineteen Lyra admits being ignorant on certain things (another thing her thirteen-year-old self would have handled differently). Lyra doesn't understand love, at least not the one written in Jane Austen's books.

"We love them like we loved Roger," Pantalaimon continues.

That knocks almost all the air out of Lyra's lungs, it feels like a lightbulb in her brain. (Mixed with her grief for Roger that never left her as RP & S carved on the botanical garden bench next to WP & K could testify).

"But why?" she asks because, like all things not told to her by the alethiometer (currently resting on her palms while she sits on her bed in St. Sophia), she doubts. "What changed?"

"We grew up?" Pantalaimon suggests, uncertain.

Lyra looks at the alethiometer. "This is going to be a complicated question."

vii.

Did I love him?

Yes.

Why don't I now?

You still do.

I love him differently.

Yes.

Why?

Your destiny was fulfilled, Eve doesn't have to be in love with Adam anymore.

viii.

It feels like a weight off her shoulders and boulder to the chest.

"We weren't allowed to be ourselves with them, Pan," Lyra whispers to her dæmon in the dead of night. She's crying but almost like an afterthought, her breathing doesn't heave and there is no knot in her throat.

Pantalaimon licks her cheeks, wiping the tears.

"We were manipulated by destiny, I couldn't choose not to be in love with him." Lyra wipes the tears and the feeling of Pantalaimon's saliva. "I couldn't choose to love him my way."

"And what way is that?" Pantalaimon asks like he already knows, and he does.

"Like I loved Roger, like I love Roger." Lyra brings Pantalaimon close to her face to bury her nose in his fur. The fur Will petted and baptised as her dæmon's settled form (though sometimes she feels a tug on her heartstrings when Pantalaimon is a little too far from her and she thinks he is changing into different animals behind her back). "I don't want to kiss or date or get married, ever. I am happy like this."

"Me too."

"I wish we could explain it to Will and Kirjava."

"The method of travel the angel mentioned — imagination —, remember? If we learn how to do that we will be able to see them. Maybe they realised they were manipulated too."

"And if they weren't and they were in love?"

"Then, they love us enough to understand."

ix.

Mary's travel to China, Lyra thinks about that too.

She looks at all she felt and did during her travels with suspicion now. She can no longer trust that girl — Eve — who feels alienated from Lyra Silvertongue. Eve acted as she was supposed to, not as she wanted.

(And she is angry because she feels lied to and, oh, it's ironic. When had she stopped being herself? Before or after she crossed the bridge to the sky?)

"I don't like marzipan," Lyra says, "And I don't wanna go to China."

"Me neither," says Pantalaimon, and he sounds happy.

x.

"Why did you never get married, Hannah?"

Dame Hannah — first elected woman of the parliament as of this morning —, grabs a butter cookie from the plate between her and Lyra on the bench of the botanical garden. It is one in the afternoon of midsummer day and they are having tea. Hibiscus tea, something new and tropical Lyra brought back from her travels to Hispania Nova.

Jesper and Pantalaimon are on shoulder and lap respectively.

"I never had the inclination to," says Dame Hannah.

"You never loved anyone?"

"Not enough to marry."

"Have you dated?"

"I did, when I was younger, about your age. My first kiss was at twenty-three if you would believe that, my nieces love that story, they think it's hilarious. It stopped being a priority after the fourth or fifth date, until I completely forgot to even try ." Dame Hannah takes another cookie, having handed the previous one to Jesper. "And here I am."

Lyra smiles and spins the small hibiscus floating on her rose-tinted tea.

"And here we are."

"Having a partner is overrated if you ask me," says Dame Hannah. "There is nothing wrong with wanting to be by yourself as long as you are happy."

Just last month Lyra assisted to one of her ex-roommate's wedding, a clandestine affair held in one Godstow Priory down in Oxfordshire. The Sisters were delighted to officiate for the two young ladies. Lyra learned to use her career as an excuse to skirt around suitors. Her friends had all but stopped pressuring her since they graduated. More married like Selene Ríos did, others Lyra wasn't quite sure because she never saw them again. Gwenyth Nakamura had a son now, she heard.

Maybe if her role models (like Dame Hannah or the Master of Jordan) were the type to get married and have kids, Lyra might have felt pressured.

Instead.

"I am. Happy, I mean."

Dame Hannah smiles. "Good."

Lyra takes another sip of her tea and thumbs the WP & K on the bench. Both WP & K and RP & S have hearts carved around them now.

xi.

The zeppelin is to leave at first light tomorrow, so Lyra comes to the bench despite the date. Whenever she misses a midsummer day because of her expeditions and travels she comes the day before she leaves to make up for it.

(She adds it to the list of things she will tell Will when she manages to travel with her imagination.)

"I'm going back to the North," she tells the sunlight coming through the trees. "Maybe I will see your world in the Aurora, or hear you where the veil between the worlds is thinner. There is so much I want to tell you, Will."

And she will still find him on dragonfly wings and the raindrops and pine trees, like she will find Roger and Mr. Scoresby and her own Pantalaimon. Because she loves him in her own way as fiercely (because Lyra Silvertongue does everything fierce) as she loved him when they said goodbye.

A/N: I don't know if the other 6 will be as self-reflective as this one, mostly I was projecting. Unlike Lyra, I have never kissed or thought I was in love with someone, but her feelings on her journey to realise there is nothing wrong with her are a reflection of my own.