Will sat stiffly up in bed and coughed himself into hysterics.
Lyra was beside him in a moment rubbing his back until the fit passed. Kirjava lept from his chest to his side quickly to ease any pressure.
His coughing subsided, Will slowly found his voice. "What happened, Kirjava"
"We're sick, Will." Kirjava looked up at him with something close to pity, though whether the look was for both of them or Will alone was unclear. They had just suffered a heart attack.
"Oh, Will!" Lyra was hugging his right hand to her face, "All of us were so worried." Pantalaimon dropped from Lyra's shoulder into his own warm place next to Kirjava. Will slowly let a smile cover his face, both guilty and scared.
"All of us?" He toned.
"Oh, sorry. Pantalaimon and I, a lot. We were pretty scared there, Will...watching you fall like that...then Kirjava...we thought..." she trailed as the tears made their slow descent down her already reddened face - just as they had done the past few days. Crying had become the only easy part of her love's vigil. She noticed Will waiting for her to finish the thought - he didn't like things hanging open like that, too many possibilities intruded. She took a breath. "We thought it was 'then'. We thought you'd died on us, right there. Right when I hugged you, right when I kissed you. We thought 'That's all, that's it.' But they worry about you at Jordan, too. The Master, the Scholars, servants, all the professors." She clarified for him.
"But we made it through." He smiled to his love.
"But how many more times?" Kirjava asked quietly from the foot of his bed. But it wasn't his bed at all, he realized quite suddenly.
"Lyra, where are we? This isn't my room." Will took in the things around him, all his photograms, the floor mat they'd woven together along the canals, his jackets hanging from the back of the door. But the white wardrobe and dresser were not his. The bed was a double, just as he was familiar with, and the sheets were his, but it didn't feel familiar. He pushed his legs around inside the familiar purple sheets - definately not the right bed. "Don't worry, Will. We're in a hospital. I moved the things here so it would be normal when you woke up. I didn't want you to be confused." She smiled, "I guess I also wanted to be comfortable while I was waiting for you to wake up"
"...because of the heart attack." Will seemed to be slowly catching up to the world around him. Seeing Lyra, safe, as he woke up allowed for Will to figure out himself. 'As long as Lyra is okay, then we can figure out everything from there.'
Lyra fell through the door into the chemistry laboratory. It was the lightest door at Jordan, being added the most recently it's style was far less ornate than the rest of the classicly built Jordan College. She'd meant to simply push it open, but Lyra had grown up at old Jordan, new Jordan was just that: new. Not that she didn't like new Jordan. In fact new Jordan was just an improvement on what she'd been accustomed to.
New Jordan was what sprung up in the wake of the diminished Church powers. New Jordan expanded even further into its tight space. New Jordan welcomed in Sebastian Makepeace as a chemist where other colleges had scorned his previous "alchemist" labelling. New Jordan pushed its roots further, testing if the Church truly was gathering itself to lick its wounds and not just waiting to deliver the whip to the first foot out of line. They didn't stick a foot out, they stepped out entirely. The Sub-Rector was pushed into a small converted basement room. His sparse room was handed over to a promising New Dane botanist. This was only four years past. The Master, no longer the raven-dæmoned man Lyra had grown up with but a younger man: well travelled and a previous student enrolled on the Cassington scholarship, bit his lip in the wait for the Church's reprimand. His hand, unslapped, drew X's over Church proposals. An annual donation request from the Consistorial Court in Geneva was, regrettably, denied. Again, the Master waited for a knock on the door, a condemned sign that would inevitably hang in Jordan's Yaxley Quad, a summons to appear in Geneva, a police escort to deliver it. Nothing came. The Church lost Jordan College. But their failing grip ensnared others more tightly than before. Cardinal's became Christ College. St. John's restricted all female residencies to nuns. But Jordan had escaped. And they'd gained Sebastian Makepeace. Lyra had come to him before, but she was desperate then.
"Mr. Makepeace," Lyra pushed her fumbling hands into leather gloves to assist him in carrying tubes from his vented work area into a small side closet. "You were an alchemist, right"
"I was." he answered simply.
"For how long"
"Lyra, are you testing my credentials?" He finished putting three small tubes into a rack and pulled a stool over for her to sit on.
"Well, no. Not really. What I mean is did you work on alchemy for the money"
"Lead into gold"
"Yeah, that sort. I don't know what you alchemists do properly, but I've heard some"
"And what have you heard?" His tone was low. Something about him had always reminded her how Will would never grow old. It wasn't their similar shocking black hair, though Makepeace's was dulled with grey by now, it wasn't even their similar dæmons. It wasn't in the way he spoke with her - always serious, but never unfriendly. There was always some secret pain he had in his eye that she could never know. Will had that, too. But she knew why in Will's case. She knew how much his bravery had hurt him getting back on that bus to Oxford. She knew his tears when he closed off the window, standing underneath the palms in Cittagazze. What she didn't know, couldn't know, is how it hurt him, all the little ways leaving his mother behind had torn him apart within. He'd been shredded inside, but she could never know - he wouldn't let her. That would've been the breaking straw letting Lyra have that guilt. He kept it to himself. Lyra took the stool and suddenly felt very childish. This whole alchemy business was nonsense! But Makepeace had already admitted he'd worked at it in earnest - she had nothing to lose. But I'll lose everything if I don't even try. I can't even be human if I can't have enough in me to try.
"The Philospher's Stone, the Elixer of Life." Lyra bit her lip hard. Pantalaimon ducked under her stool and skittered out from the other side.
"He's sick already, isn't he?" Makepeace sighed.
Lyra nodded. They were only nineteen.
"Who decided, Lyra, you or him"
"He said...he said he'd come here. Pan and I, we thought it, but we couldn't say it. Professor, if there were anything in the world, any way to take that back right now, I'd fight him. I would've had him living in his own world a full and healthy life. This isn't right! We have to be able to fix it! Things turn out right eventually - they have to else the world would be a terrible place!" Lyra'd been digging her nails into the stool to keep the welling tears down. She fought against the damn straining her throat and making her croak. She looked him in the eye with all the restraint she could hold on to, "But the world's not terrible at all because there is love like that, and because I love him like that, too"
"And would the world be terrible, even if your love was not here"
"No." Lyra darkened, "No, it would be better because I could still love him just as he is, and he could love me too, but we'd both get our whole lives for that"
"But William chose death in this world to a lifetime in his own"
"He chose me." Lyra gritted her teeth against Makepeace's defeatist notions. "Death is my consequence." The damn was unprepared for the searing cry which ripped through it and the tears began. "Lyra," Makepeace hugged the crying girl as he thought of his own son and the pain he'd gone through losing him. "Will made his own choices, he always has for as long as I've known him. But it wasn't uninformed. He didn't chose this life from ignorance. He knew what he had chosen for himself. He's chosen to fill what life he has with you, and to fill it here. But he's also chosen death"
"The elixer..." Lyra sobbed into his chest.
Makepeace shook his head. "I'm sorry, Lyra. It's just the same as time: there is no backward. He's made the decision. There is no cure for death."
-----That last line comes from the song 'Brothers': "Ot smyerti lyekarstva nyet." I don't know if it's the most proper of translations, but I'd heard it translated that way once and it stuck.