AN: Yes, I am well aware that in the HDM books, when Pantalaimon finally settles, it's as a pine marten, not a white ermine. But, as I think I have made perfectly clear in the past, I don't LIKE the HDM books. Or to be more exact, I don't like the last two (aka "The subtle knife" and "The Amber Spyglass"); the first one was actually pretty good if you can get passed the depressingly sad ending and some of the anti-god slips Pullman drops that are more overt there than in the movie. I don't have anything against pine martens, of course, I think they're really cute little animals (in fact, if you look back at some chapters in "The Silver Pocket Watch" I did actually have one of Pan's shapes be a pine marten), but since I'm NOT following the plot of the last two books (I'm making up my own), I didn't want him to SETTLE as one. I decided to make him stay a white ermine as a final form instead (and you have to admit, white ermines are JUST as cute-looking as pine martens). And, no, Will Parry is NOT going to be in this fic (not even in a cameo), so don't bother asking. I'm pairing Lyra up with Billy Costa later instead; I think they make a better couple.
There was almost no colour whatsoever in the ruins of the abandoned subway station; it was all pale grays and lime-stone whites, the colour of ashes. There was very little light as well. The only way of seeing much of anything in that place was to step in the directions where there were cracks in the dome-shaped ceiling up ahead and to squint in the murky purplish-red dusk strains that came from the cold-mostly empty-sky outside.
Lyra Silvertongue found herself wishing that her dæmon, Pantalaimon, had not yet settled and could have shifted into a firefly, the way he often did when she was a little girl and had chosen to explore a dark place. Glowing like a willow-the-wisp out of a Gyptian's scary fire-side tale, his little firefly shape had always been both a comfort and an eerie presence at the same time. She missed that. Not so much (except for just then, since it was so dark), however, as she missed his hissing pole-cat forms; there was something distinctly wild and familiar about Pantalaimon being a cat, something that felt rather right. He had settled, actually, as a snow-white ermine, a form that had been one of his favourites for sleeping when his human had been a little girl.
She wasn't little anymore; the three years had done her in a bit. Her short, almost stocky, little figure had become taller and, much to her disappointment as it did not seem somehow to be quite an appropriate body for someone who liked roughness, travel, and exploration, and all the other things nice, perfect ladies weren't really supposed to like, a bit willowy as well. Both she and her ermine seemed to offer a measure of grace neither of them really possessed. After all, her speech patterns, her inability to speak in grammatically correct sentences, especially when she was angry, had not improved, or even changed, in the least.
For nearly three whole years she'd been wandering this dumpy other-world. It seemed to be a world at its end that should have disappeared upon its death but hadn't. If she had not had Pan to talk to, she would have gone mad long ago. There was no one to take care of her here, and though she didn't mind that, seeing as she was a strong-willed sort of person who could easily take care of herself and disliked being fussed over, there were moments when it was a bit lonely.
This was not, she had to admit, what she had been hoping for-or even expecting-when she'd followed her father, Lord Asriel, through the door in the Northern Lights. She'd expected she would have something very important to do here. That the Lion had wanted her to be here-something in his face. Aslan hadn't meant as much to her as he had evidently meant to Lucy Pevensie, but she still felt compelled, all the same, to be where he wanted her to be. Where she needed to be. And he had let her come here without trying to stop her. But why, she wondered, would she have to be in the middle of nowhere? This whole world was a nowhere!
The only glimmers of hope she'd had in the past years spent in the dumpy nowhere was one or two sightings of something that looked like Dust. She had always followed it, as she felt she and Pan were perhaps supposed to find Dust and then would miraculously know, at last, what they had to do. But she always lost the trail.
Sometimes Pan said, "It's too bad we don't have help."
"We help each other, Pan," Lyra would reply. "And we got the alethiometer, too. We ain't givin' up, Pan. We keep searching for Dust; when we've found it, we'll know what to do."
Comforted, even satisfied for the time being, Pan would reply, "And we'll do it."
Mostly, as there didn't seem to be anyone living in that empty world, Lyra had had to keep her ears open for signs of life the same way an animal does when its being hunted; for she was avoiding her father, Lord Asriel, and his dæmon, Stelmaria. She was a little afraid of him; he'd disliked being stuck in this world even more than she did and seemed to be getting more dangerously angry over it, over being held as useless as a prisoner, so that she was afraid he would do something drastic.
It was funny how easily Lyra kept forgetting how afraid of him she was, though, when she hadn't seen him in a while.
It was just like back at Jordan College; Lord Asriel meant excitement and a change of pace. This was something Pan always had to warn his human about getting too close to. It wasn't safe, he reminded her frequently. Often he pointed out what Asriel had tried to do to Susan and Maugrim to get into this other world, this world that had seemed so bright and beautiful when seen from the Northern Lights-not as it truly was, with its broken-down buildings and crumbing places of learning. Of course, Lyra didn't think he would do anything like that to her, at least not lightly, considering he hadn't wanted to use Lucy and Reepicheep to get the energy needed to travel between worlds. Still, it was best not to take any chances. No need to confront him unless she had to, even when her loneliness and her irksome desire, in spite of everything, to have a real father, made her want to.
That morning, Lyra had woken up in one of the ruined houses she'd been living in (she had to switch houses every few days, usually, because either of Lord Asriel getting closer or else some crucial part of the rooms falling in like a plaster avalanche. Her clothes, which, surprisingly, were not particularly ratty, had been pilfered from old wardrobes and cabinets and closets and draws from the different places she lived in.
Once, for two months, she had stayed very happily in what she assumed was once a fine college not unlike Jordan where she'd grown up. It was a lovely old place, in better shape than most of its neighboring buildings, and its over-all home-like feel made all this waiting-out easier to endure. Then Lord Asriel showed up, searching the college, not for his daughter, but for any useful tools or documents left behind by whatever scholars had once lived there. He ended up making it his own temporary house; and so Lyra and Pan crept out through the former servants corridors while he was sleeping.
Anyway, the house Lyra was currently living in was an old manor, probably the former home of a lady, she thought with some unease, similar to Mrs. Coulter. There were some faded portraits on the walls of the second-floor and they had a lady with a sleek monkey dæmon (apparently the people in this world had had dæmons) in them, only her hair-what could be seen of it-was glossy black, not butter blonde. Lyra disliked sleeping on that floor and usually avoided it altogether; it gave her and Pan nightmares.
When she had stretched, yawned, and dressed herself, she'd seen a stream of Dust, glittering against the dismalness, swirling outside her window. Scooping Pan up into her arms, she followed it down the cracked cobblestone roads to the old underground station.
"The Dust is gone again," said Pan sadly, climbing up from his mistress's arms onto her shoulders where he could slink over them and rest comfortably.
"It stayed longer this time, and it led us here…" Lyra mused. "My God, Pan! What an awful place this is." Somehow the station, which should have been bright, poster-filled, and teaming with crowds, being empty and broken was worse even than the second-floor paintings were.
"What are we going to do now, Lyra?"
"Dunno, I'm gonna ask the alethiometer," Lyra decided, taking the golden compass out of her coral-coloured sweater's left pocket. She, like Lucy, was one of the few lucky persons who could read an alethiometer by instinct and hadn't needed to study for years and years as Edmund had.
Resting the alehiometer between the palms of her open hands as she sat on the remains of what must have been a bench in the old days when this station was a real transportation service instead of the silvery-gray lodging for shadowy corners and aberrations, Lyra gazed down at its crystal face encircled with gold. In her head she held her question lightly, like it was something alive. It was no good to demand of the alethiometer an answer, even when you read it the natural, studious way; by instinct, it was all the more necessary not to.
Where do I go now? What do I do? Where's the Dust gone to? What about the Lion, ain't he ever gonna send for me or nothing? Lyra's thoughts, however gently-meant, were racing. The hands on the alethiometer moved round in a useless manner similar to that of a compass when a magnet is throwing off its ability to tell directions, as if to punish her for asking too many questions at once. Sighing, she narrowed it down in her mind and held her inquiries even more lightly.
Finally, it answered. She saw herself, Pan scampering along at her ankles, walking through the tunnel on the ruined tracks until she vanished from sight. Before she could try to ask another question, Pan, sitting beside her, let out a shrill cry.
"It's Stelmaria, they're coming!"
The great pad-padding of the snow-leopard's paws were as close to dead-silent as one could get in a place full of as many old echoes as this ghost-station was, but Pantalaimon could sense the presence of another dæmon. Indeed, it wasn't more than a few seconds after her dæmon caught wind of Stelmaria coming that Lyra could distantly hear the sound of Lord Asriel's boots against the stone, brick, and cement that covered the station floor.
"We've got to go quick, then, Pan." Lyra stood up, closed the alethiometer, and stuffed it back into her pocket. "Come on, hurry."
Together they raced into the dark tunnel, not stopping to think about what could possibly be waiting for them on the other side.
Nevertheless, they weren't, even subconsciously, expecting what they did come into. It was like magic. There was a flash, followed by a sound that-Pantalaimon thought-was very rich, like a bugle or a hunting horn. Then they noticed that the track under their feet wasn't broken the way it had been further back, and the feeling that, while they were still in a subway station, it was not the same station they'd just been in a few moments before, came over them.
"Gosh, Pan," muttered Lyra under her breath, unable to think of anything else to say as she took in their strange surroundings.
The tile on the walls wasn't gray and it wasn't falling off, either. It was yellow and red, and there were posters on some of them. There was a bench, sort of parallel to the broken one they'd been sitting on back in that other, dead world, only this one was whole and not so old.
Then came a voice: "Hey, you!"
Lyra's head jerked round and Pan's neck turned.
Three or four large, stupid-looking boys of about fifteen, dressed in English school uniforms, were standing on the platform, staring down at Lyra and Pan on the track.
"What do you want?" Lyra demanded, not liking their faces.
"Better get off the track before the subway comes," one of them chuckled. "Otherwise, you'll be smashed flat."
Lyra did not like them, but she liked the idea of being 'smashed flat' even less, so she and Pan obeyed and climbed up onto the platform.
"What's this?" said one of the boys, noticing Pan.
"He's mine," Lyra said too quickly and in too harsh a tone, the kind that invites bullies because they know they can get to you easily.
"Wook, She's got a wittle ferret!" The nastiest of the group jeered, reaching down and unknowingly breaking the rules of a serious taboo.
Lyra panicked; she felt their fingers on her own limbs through them touching her dæmon and was utterly repulsed. "You can't! You ain't…it's not allowed…put him down!"
Pan's ear was pulled; and he dared not cry out for his human. His repressed scream came bellowing out of Lyra's throat and open mouth.
They started playing 'hot-potato' with poor Pantalaimon, who was trembling uncontrollably by this point, tossing him back and forth like a hacky-sack.
For Lyra, the world all around her spun wildly out of control, she fell to her knees sobbing. Three times in a row she threw up. But this only made the boys feel even more amused, and they didn't lessen in manhandling Pan, still assuming he was her pet.
She screamed again. That scream was her saving grace. A young man, walking towards their part of the platform from the other side of the station heard and rushed towards her; it was none other than Peter Pevensie.
"What on earth?" Peter exclaimed, not recognizing her at first but sensing something amiss as he grabbed her arm and helped her to her feet.
She was seeing double, but she still recognized him-even if there were two, no, make that three of him. "Peter?"
Her voice was the tip-off. "Lyra?"
Where's her dæmon? He thought, looking round. Then he noticed the boy again and saw more clearly what it was they were grabbing and squeezing at. It was a beautiful white ermine; Pan!
"Let him go, you idiots!" Peter shouted, reaching over and trying to pry poor Pantalaimon out of their grasp.
One of them bumped against his shoulder while shifting to play keep-away with Lyra's dæmon. "Better say sorry, mate." He spoke as if Peter was the one who had bumped him.
"I'm not apologizing to you!" he retorted indignantly, punching the boy dead in the face when it became clear that not only did he want an apology but he also wasn't going to give up Pan.
If Peter felt at all bad about hitting a school-age boy when he himself was older and in a university, a grown-up, it wasn't until later. His blood was boiling over how they were violating Lyra too much for him to feel any pity just then.
Pan was released at last and he raced back over to Lyra's open arms.
Unfortunately, a fight ensued as the boys weren't, apparently, very bright and thought they could take Peter and 'teach him a lesson' and tried to beat him up.
Still a little dizzy, but coming more to herself, Lyra jumped on the back of the boy about to hit Peter while the others held him by his arms.
"Leave him alone!" This was followed by many colourful words Peter would have preferred her not even to know, let alone, use.
"What the devil's going on over here?" a bobby came rushing towards them blowing a whistle.
Where were you a few minutes ago? Both Lyra and Pan and Peter couldn't help thinking rather sullenly.
"These boys were victimizing this poor girl," Peter told the bobby in his most grown-up tone as Lyra slid off of the boy's back, back onto the platform ground. "I tried to make them stop, but they wouldn't. I'm sorry it had to get this far, though."
"You're that university student who's wife's got that big dog, aren't you?" asked the bobby, reaching up and straightening his helmet.
"Yes, that's me."
"You don't usually cause trouble, far as I can remember." His eyes zeroed in on the boys. "As for you, I wish I could say the same. Aren't you the same hooligans who threw a cricket ball at my head the other day?"
Most of the boys, though stupid, were clever enough to deny it; all except one, who said, "It was only a little cricket ball."
"Robbie, you fumble-mouthed moron!" The others glared at him.
"You boys had better come with me," said the bobby, ignoring their protests of, "But you don't understand!"; "We were framed!"; "That man hit us-for no reason. He should be the one in trouble, not us!"; and, "You don't by any chance still have my cricket ball, do you?"
"Thanks," Lyra said to Peter under her breath, cradling a frazzled, dazed Pan in the crook of her right arm.
"You're welcome," Peter blurted out. Then, in a completely different sort of breathless tone, one of delight and not exhaustion, "But, Lyra, is it really you? I can't believe it! I mean, how did you get here? You've gotten taller, too, I think."
Before Lyra could answer him, there came a growl, and a snow-leopard appeared on the same tracks of the same tunnel she and Pan had come out of earlier. After her, stepping out of the shadows and standing just behind his dæmon, came the unmistakable shape of Lord Asriel.
Pan let out a whimper, burying his face under his human's armpit in a cowardly manner. Lyra did what was a bit surprising for her but was something Lucy would have done without a second thought; she found herself stepping closer to Peter, as if for protection.
Peter slipped his arm around her shoulders and pressed her tightly to his side, giving Asriel a hard look.
Lord Asriel stepped off the track, Stelmaria just in front of him.
For a moment they all stood on the platform staring at one another wordlessly.
After this pause, Asriel said to Peter, "Well, well. It's been a while, hasn't it, Pevensie?"
"Whatever it is you want," Peter growled, "the answer is no."
"Lyra," said Lord Asriel, "what did you mean following me through the Northern Lights just to avoid me all that time? You've behaved stupidly and accomplished nothing."
"Same for you," Lyra shot back.
Nice one, thought Peter.
"And you, Pevensie!" Lord Asriel turned his attention back to Peter. "What is your problem?"
"Oh, let me think…" Peter sneered; his eyes narrowed and flashed with hatred. "Maybe my problem is that, the last time we saw each other, you were trying to kill my wife and unborn child."
Stelmaria beat one of her white paws on the platform ground impatiently, rolling her eyes.
"Pevensie, has anyone ever told you that you have a real problem letting things go?"
"Maybe I'm not getting across here," Peter huffed. "You tried to kill my wife; you're dead to me."
"Oh, and I suppose the fact that I saved your sorry neck from that spy-fly and not only got you to safety but also secured a place for in at Jordan College for four years-where you were completely untroubled-meant nothing?" He raised a golden eyebrow challengingly.
Peter was not defeated, but he was momentarily silenced. He could never forgive Lord Asriel for what he had done to Susan and to unborn Christian, yet he couldn't quite forget, even now, the debt he owed this man for saving his life in that snow-covered wilderness that surrounded Bolvangar. He could never forget that Lord Asriel had never even told Lucy and Lyra that he was their father, that they'd had to find it out from the Gyptian King, and still he could never quite pay the man back for what he had done for his scholarly pursuits in regards to Jordan College, either. It was truly being between a rock and a hard place-dealing with this nobleman.
Finally, having nothing else to say, Peter let go of Lyra's arm, grabbed her hand instead, and said, "Come on, Lyra, let's go."
"If you want to travel between worlds, Pevensie, you'll need my help-whether you like it or not!" Lord Asriel called after him, his voice echoing across the empty-at the moment-station.
Peter turned round half-way. "How do you know I want to go back?"
"You have the same expression on your face I had whenever I looked at my photogram of the city beyond the Northern Lights, having no way-at the time-to get to it. That feeling of helplessness, the one I've had for nearly three years after reaching my goal and getting no closer to finding the source of Dust through it-everything being for nothing. We're the same now."
"We," Peter said tersely, "are not the same."
"Deny it all you want, Pevensie. That changes nothing." He and his dæmon blinked their eyes indifferently in unison. "How long has it been, by the way, that you've been trying to get back? Any luck?"
Two days since we saw the Dust and figured it out about Svalbard, Peter thought, and no, Susan and I haven't got any leads-we're almost all out of ideas.
He said none of this out loud, refusing to give Lord Asriel the satisfaction. But he did hang his head, defeated at last.
"Didn't think so," said Lord Asriel.
This is for Edmund and Lucy, I'm doing this for them, Peter reminded himself. "Fine."
AN: Please review.