"When you get spanked, I hurt too." This comment in the beginning of the film, while making some sort of sense for the time period, just bothers me. So I'm fixing it. Asriel is a protective, possessive bastard, my Asriel even more so, and he'd never hit a child, nor allow anyone else to. And that's just... final.
This story belongs to its author and creators, the respect and love necessary to write a tribute belongs to me.
TapTap
Lyra and her father had together gone back to a strangely unchanged Jordan from the one Lyra and her uncle had left apart. Asriel had announced he would make more trips into the north, bringing his daughter, but the master of the university had welcomed his presence until such a time. Order might be restored after the Magisterium's rule had been so thoroughly ended, but Lord Asriel Belaqua remained an authority of more than northern lights ever after.
It was not with any degree of surprise, that Lyra walked into their private sitting room one evening after her lessons ended, to find not only her father, but also Serafina Pekkala already there. The two were sitting needlessly close together, her father even having abandoned his usual comfortable chair to sit on its large, padded footrest, his one knee bent and almost touching the crossed legs of Serafina. Lyra watched them for nearly half a minute, talking fast and lower than she could hear, before her father noticed her and frowned at her eavesdropping.
Avoiding his lecture by instead throwing herself into Serafina Pekkala's waiting arms, Lyra hugged the woman she'd wish to grow up to be like tightly. When she whispered, "I missed you," it had nothing to do with stopping Lord Asriel's lecture on manners before it begun. Were her father really cross enough to give her a dressing down for it, nothing could stop him anyway.
Lyra knew that her father rarely bothered to be cross. He did not believe in rules, nor did he ever spank her, like had sometimes previously been her punishment, and the one time after they'd returned someone else had tried to her father had physically thrown him from the room. No one had dared to try, since, but it became the father's perogative to punish and raise his child. Between starting to grow up during their time away and responding well to her father's peculiar form of "I have few rules but if you don't follow them all hell will break lose" parenting, there were few complaints of her behaviour.
"Lyra," Serafina's fond voice, never pronouncing her name in that hateful way of Mrs Coulter, brought her back to the present. "Your father and I have talked. We have... some changes we'd like to run by you. You know we like each other, and I know you do not have a mother, but..."
"Of course I have a mother," Lyra told the two adults without awaiting the end of that sentence, shifting her eyes to Serafina only and announcing, without a shadow of a doubt, "it is you."
The witch never left them for long, ever again.