Lyra Returns (His Dark Materials)
As Lyra returned to her Oxford after leaving Will behind, she kept going back to a particular memory. It was when they had ended up in the land of the mulefa after they had left the war behind. She never forgot that moment she experienced on waking up in a paradise full of wonder and awe. She remembered too the moments she had spent watching Will as he slept on exhaustedly. She remembered watching his eyelashes moving; as a feeling she had never known before took over her senses. She laughed, as she at the memory of how embarrassed she was, as he woke up suddenly, not wanting him to see she'd been watching him.
Of course, now she knew what the feeling had been, it was no longer a mystery but a massive hole in her heart. She doubted the hole would ever be filled again, for how can you replace that part of you in someone else, when everything had felt so right?
She forced herself to return to her reading and tried to keep her mind active, but everything felt so different now and none of it for the better. Even her relationship with Pan was not the same, how could it be after leaving him that evening, in the land of the Dead? By leaving her soul, she had betrayed him, and it was something she could never put right. As she closed her eyes longing for the tears not to fall, she forced herself to write once again. As the pen flitted across the page, she felt Pan's eye's watching her from the other side of the room. It felt like a dagger in her back.