Fic: A Moon-Lit Challenge (The Ill-Met, Proud Titania Remix) (Good Omens/His Dark Materials)
A Moon-Lit Challenge (The Ill-Met, Proud Titania Remix) [Crossover, Good Omens/His Dark Materials, Adam Young/Lyra Belacqua, R]
Author: vulgarweed
Fandoms: Good Omens/His Dark Materials
Pairing: Adam/Lyra (with appearances by, of course, Pantalaimon, as well as Mary Malone, Dog, Aziraphale, Crowley, and a guest star)
Rating: R
Summary: The new Eve and an Antichrist - not so much star-crossed as Dust-crossed lovers. Lyra wants her happy ending so badly, but she's still a long way away from endings of any kind.
Disclaimer: Apologies to Philip Pullman, Neil Gaiman, and Terry Pratchett.
Author's notes: There are references here and there to Gaiman's and Pratchett's other work, and...who knows what else. Things tend to blur together in L-Space.
Original story: A Moon-Lit Challenge, by hyel
Adam Young has always known there is more than one world. He has put the thought aside for most of his life, because the one he knows best, the one he rules with the lightest possible hand, is more than enough to manage. But since he was eleven and he changed this world in order to save it, he has found it more and more difficult to ignore what lurks in the corners of his mind.
He wasn’t born in this world, after all, despite what the only parents he knows may think. So he doesn’t have to stay here--though, given his druthers, he will. He loves the parents who raised him, and ice cream and sci-fi and motorbikes, and Pepper and Brian and Wensleydale and Dog, and the pub that Tadfield didn’t have until Adam was old enough to appreciate the need for one, and then the pub was the sort that had always been there, raising boisterous generations amid the merry stench of cider and ale that were never less than suspiciously perfectly golden.
You might think that Adam’s only two choices of worlds would be the one that is his and the one where he was born - and the choice between those two would be pretty obvious when you got down to it, because Adam was born in Hell, which is always worse by definition. But it’s more complicated than that, as stories usually are, because there is really a ridiculous, incomprehensible number of other possibilities, and Adam wonders from time to time, not quite idly, if he is an Antichrist in all of them. It would be nice to find someplace where he was a little more ordinary, for relaxing short holidays if nothing else.
Dog always came along with him, which is why the strangest girl Adam ever met wasn’t disgusted by him. At least not at first.
The girl with the dark golden hair and the pine marten always around her-on her shoulder, at her heels-was the most fascinating creature Adam had ever seen, and that included Atlanteans and Tibetans as well as angels and demons and hellhounds and the Four Horsepersons of the Apocalypse.
Lyra was-not a girl per se, if Pepper were there she’d set him straight on that, a young woman--about his own age, and already she wore reading glasses on account of all the time she spent poring over books of strange symbols and an object that bore all those symbols on a round face like a watch or a compass. “It told me you were coming,” she’d said. “Told me somethin’ about who you are. But it wouldn’t tell me everything. I reckon you have to do that.”
But it was Lyra who did more of the talking. For someone so young she had no shortage of stories, and after a time Adam could only lie beside her and be lost in a place of polar bears who talked and wore armour, and witches who needed only branches to fly, and knives and specters and these strange beings, daemons. Adam grew to understand that the marten-who had a name, Pantalaimon, and could talk and certainly seemed to have quite the sassy mind of his own-wasn’t a pet or even really a separate creature at all, but a part of Lyra, part of her mind and her soul.
Adam, who knew more than he really wanted to about souls but not the specific things he wanted to know about souls, thought it would be terrifying to have part of your soul hanging around outside of your body like that-what if something happened to it?
(It was fortunate that in Lyra’s world, castration complexes were not much spoken of in the literal-minded way of Adam’s world.)
Lyra told him about Bolvangar and intercision.
Adam couldn’t really understand the horror of it, and he had no daemon to clutch closer in reaction-Dog played the role only so well and was, at the moment, engaged in some very personal hygiene-but he had Lyra nearby and so he reached for her hand, and was startled when he touched fur. Pantalaimon was leaning into his caress. Lyra’s eyes were bright and hungry in the twilight.
“You don’t touch somebody else’s daemon,” she whispered. “Not unless he touches you first.”
“He did touch me first! I didn’t mean to.”
“I know,” she said, and kissed him.
***
For nearly a decade Lyra had dreams.
We shall close them all, because if you thought that any still remained, you would spend your life searching for one, and that would be a waste of the time you have.
She had dreams where Xaphania had been wrong, wrong, wrong. Where there were doors upon doors that opened hidden in impossibly remote corners, and all the life of all the worlds depended on her finding an open doorway - and Will-once again.
Where a terrible urgency drove her to scratch with her nails at walls that should have been doors until the blood oozed from beneath her nails and Dust died as it fell, limp and grey in her hair like raining ashes.
She was never sure which was worse, the dreaming or the waking.
When she leaned close to Adam Young, she found the scent of his hair did not exist in her world. But she had smelled it before.
He didn’t look or sound or taste like Will, but when she closed her eyes and kissed him, the tiniest of windows opened between their lips.
She was awake and alert and alive, and she moaned softly to drown out the still little voice of Pantalaimon, who was probably going to tell her what she was wanting to do wasn’t fair or right, not to this young man who no doubt had problems of his own, not to Will, not to the worlds she could tear asunder.
Lyra thought that after all this time and all this pain, if she didn’t allow herself just a few precious moments of not caring, she would explode.
Adam responded to her with unhesitant, trusting pleasure. And Lyra remembered how it had been. And she began to feel the slightest restirrings of love, and she knew she could not trust them.
***
When Lyra’s anger broke loose, Adam only wanted to stand in its fury and calm it.
The strangeness of making love to a girl from another world never quite dispersed, though her lithe, strong body was completely normal, human and animal, smooth and heated. She slapped him, she gripped him, she rode him, and there was nothing in her fury and passion that Adam couldn’t withstand.
So he distracted her. So he stroked her and licked her and filled her and let her pin him down, and took his due turn pinning her down, and endured and and enjoyed the strange sensation of love-nips from a daemon. He knew he was being warned, and he didn’t care. Wanting was so dangerous for him, and he had come to resent that - no young man, in any world ever, has relished having to be careful when desire came upon him and overtook him.
He shuddered, he cried out, he loosed it all into her, and watched her moods play like moon-streaked clouds - first dark and now shining.
“I hate you right now,” she sobbed. He had no idea why. But maybe, she might as well.
***
They lay in each other’s arms in the twilight, sweaty and gleaming. Lyra stroked her fingertips of one hand through the golden curls on Adam’s head, and of the other through the matching fuzz at the base of his belly.
“I knew you weren’t from my world right off, even if the alethiometer hadn’t said. You don’t have a daemon. Not on the outside anyway. I’m sure Dog is a very nice dog, but…your daemon wouldn’t be a dog.”
“Why not? I like dogs.”
“Nothin’ wrong with them…but the people who have dog daemons are servants. You don’t serve, do you?’
“No,” said Adam, laughing. “I’m pretty sure I don’t.” But the realization was starting to sink in that, in fact, he did-at least where Lyra was concerned.
***
When a worried Mary Malone stepped into the used-book shop in Soho, she’d expected she knew what she was going to say to anyone who pressed her. It was going to involve quantum and be incomprehensible to virtually everyone in this world, with the exception of a few Nobel Prize winners and one poor sod who played with himself a lot on the Tube.
But when the grumpy shop-keeper, who appeared to Mary as he did to everyone, a textbook example of a specific sort of highly intelligent middle-aged Englishman who dwells perpetually in a remote past decade of discreet and genteel homosexuality, looked at her with uncanny eyes, what she blurted out was, “I feel a disturbance in the Dust.” It wasn’t a comment on his housekeeping.
He slapped a palm to his forehead. “Oh no, not this again.”
Not all angels covet human flesh. Some have been assigned to wear it and have grown accustomed to it, whether it fits like sleek Italian couture or an outdated but snug camelhair coat. Some have become even blasé about the idiocies the body’s wants can lead to (Even Marisa Coulter could never have seduced this one), but remain endlessly in awe of the capacity for mischief of the human mind. But one would have to be a particularly dense angel (as indeed, many angels are-but not this one, not usually, though he’d had his moments and also had a demonic counterpart who remembered every one of them) to have lived among people for so long without picking up a few tricks. Or learning that sometimes, rules were meant to be bent. (Perhaps it helped to be bent oneself.)
Aziraphale knew whom he wanted to tell first. He decided to tell that entity second.
***
As exhilarating as rejecting all the rules can be, if there are any reckless, hormonal young people in any world who know that action brings about reaction and that natural (and supernatural) laws have a way of defending themselves, it would be Adam Young and Lyra Belacqua. They both know more than they should about such things, in fact, and in reflection later on about how horribly it could have turned out, they realized they both got off lucky. Again.
Natural (and supernatural) laws, as it happens, like Adam and Lyra. Or at least some of the law’s agents see no purpose in taking a hard line when it’s really just a matter of youthful hijinks, and the poor girl especially has suffered enough, and besides, all that business of divine punishment and apocalypse-especially apocalypse--is simply too tedious to be borne.
The forest they had come through this time was gone, and they were standing in a long, long hallway. What they had taken for tree trunks in the haze were…shelves upon shelves of books, double stacked and sideways-piled. They went to the edge of the horizon and beyond, and as the silence started to fall, it was filled with something like a dry, rustly whispering.
“I’m sorry,” Adam said quietly. “I don’t think this is it. I don’t think that was the way. I don’t know where we are.”
Two plump and more or less-man-shaped shadows gradually took on more detail in the dim light. One was almost definitely a man. The other made Lyra flinch and snarl. For the other was squat and lumpy and covered in long orange fur, and Lyra had had quite enough of people with simian daemons to last her a lifetime, and just before she could have opened her mouth and used the ‘m’ word to the chagrin of the multiverse, Adam clenched her hand. Apparently he recognized the other, the nondescript gentleman of a certain age, as some glance passed between them and Adam whispered, “Please….sshhh.”
“Ooook!” said the ape.
Not a daemon.
Lyra thought she could see the man’s daemon now-there was a…yes, there it was, a yellow-eyed serpent of unremarkable size and colour around the man’s shoulders, mostly hidden as if cold-or perhaps mortified-beneath the man’s tartan scarf.
“Oooooook!” said the ape, a little more emphatically.
“What I think my associate is saying, dear girl,” said the man to Lyra, “is that he doesn’t think you look like much of a reader, and that you’d better not let any of that blood drip on the books while you’re looking.”
“Looking…for what?”
“Oook!”
“Lyra, er, this is Mr. Fell, he runs a bookshop in my world.”
“He’s attempting to be discreet, Lyra, but there’s no need for that now. You’d probably be more likely to believe me if I tell you that I’m the angel Aziraphale, this -“ he nodded to the snake, “is Crowley, and he’s a demon, not a daemon, if you get the difference, but he’s really quite a decent sort underneath”-the snake hissed loudly-“and this-“ he nodded at the orangutan, “is the Librarian, who as you probably gathered is not from this world and oh dear, he does seem to be getting more and more grumpy the longer he stays away from his home.”
“Pleasssse get to the point,” said the snake. (The fact that Aziraphale would have had a male daemon if he’d had one at all took Lyra by an utter lack of surprise)
“Are you going to-help her find Will?” Adam said incredulously, not sure whether to be relieved or betrayed. Perhaps a bit of both. As would be appropriate, come to think of it.
“Not directly,” said Aziraphale. “Wouldn’t dream of it. But it seems to fall to us to avert apocalypses, doesn’t it?….and, dear me, Xaphania is fond of that Atlantean wine, isn’t she? She’s quite willing to consider this business an accidental oversight, in advance. You really aren’t readers, are you?”
“Oook!”
“It seems to be true, Librarian. All the trouble they went to, all those worlds…and they’ve never heard of L-space.”
“I don’t ssssupposse there’ss much chance you know which book it isss sshe’d want?” said the snake, who was finding those whispering books deeply unsettling. But with Xaphania, the Angel of Anti-Climactic Narrative Exposition, sleeping off a traumatic hangover, Aziraphale was seeming to relish filling her sandals.
A sad, resigned, “Ooook.”
“Even he doesn’t know. It’s definitely one of them, though. Lyra seems a clever girl, I’m sure she’ll find it eventually.”
“It’s all right,” Adam said to Lyra, finally.
He could feel the heat of her tears from where he stood. The temptation to touch them was overwhelming, but he resisted, for he could feel that Lyra’s pride hung by the thinnest of threads and snapping it just wasn’t something decent people did, not in front of an angel and a demon and an orangutan.
“I am so sorry,” said Lyra quietly.
“It really is all right,” said Adam. “I know you tried…to love me. But I know you really love someone else more, and you can’t make yourself stop. You just can’t. It’s not your fault.”
“It’s not fair,” she said. “En’t none of it fair.”
“No, it’s not,” Adam said. “What happened to me when I had to, you know, save the world…wasn’t nearly as bad as what happened to you. I didn’t really lose anything. I can’t judge you.”
“No, I guess you can’t. But I can, and I don’t like myself very much right now. I thought I knew better. I really did, and then I forgot all about the rules, and…”
“Lyra,” Adam said softly. “Love doesn’t have any rules. So it’s hard for love to live in a place that has them. But that place is everywhere.”
(“How’d he get so smart?” whispered Crowley to Aziraphale.
“Well, we know it wasn’t our example,” whispered Aziraphale to Crowley.)
“I guess…I had better start,” said Lyra, but there was palpable doubt in her voice.
Pantalaimon circled her ankles morosely, and then looked up at her, black eyes glittering.
(He’d been silently trying to reassure Crowley that he wasn’t a mongoose.)
“Lyra,” Pan said quietly. “Wouldn’t we just be doing the exact thing we mustn’t do - wasting our time?”
(“Reading is never a waste of time,” huffed Aziraphale.
“That’s not what you said when the Left Behind books came out,” muttered Crowley.)
Lyra looked desolate and befuddled.
“You said you didn’t lose anything,” she said to Adam. It was an accusation.
“I didn’t,” he said sadly. “Not back then. But I think I have now.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“Don’t. Just don’t,” he said, and this time he did touch her face, thumb over those lips he had kissed so hard, now already starting to steel with resignation.
“Lyra,” said Pan. “If we can walk away now…we might be free. We didn’t have a choice before, but now we do.”
“At last,” she said.
“That’s all I did,” Adam shrugged. “I argued with some people. Got them to see my point of view, a little. And then, when there was more trouble coming…I realized I could just kind of walk away. So I did. And it saved the world but more to the point…I became a sort of different me, after that. A better one.”
“Oh, Adam,” Lyra said. “Adam.” What she didn’t say, but nearly everyone heard, was What if I had met you first?
“Ook!”
“What I think he said was,” said Aziraphale helpfully, “that no one is ever told what would have happened.”
~end~
Author: vulgarweed
Fandoms: Good Omens/His Dark Materials
Pairing: Adam/Lyra (with appearances by, of course, Pantalaimon, as well as Mary Malone, Dog, Aziraphale, Crowley, and a guest star)
Rating: R
Summary: The new Eve and an Antichrist - not so much star-crossed as Dust-crossed lovers. Lyra wants her happy ending so badly, but she's still a long way away from endings of any kind.
Disclaimer: Apologies to Philip Pullman, Neil Gaiman, and Terry Pratchett.
Author's notes: There are references here and there to Gaiman's and Pratchett's other work, and...who knows what else. Things tend to blur together in L-Space.
Original story: A Moon-Lit Challenge, by hyel
Adam Young has always known there is more than one world. He has put the thought aside for most of his life, because the one he knows best, the one he rules with the lightest possible hand, is more than enough to manage. But since he was eleven and he changed this world in order to save it, he has found it more and more difficult to ignore what lurks in the corners of his mind.
He wasn’t born in this world, after all, despite what the only parents he knows may think. So he doesn’t have to stay here--though, given his druthers, he will. He loves the parents who raised him, and ice cream and sci-fi and motorbikes, and Pepper and Brian and Wensleydale and Dog, and the pub that Tadfield didn’t have until Adam was old enough to appreciate the need for one, and then the pub was the sort that had always been there, raising boisterous generations amid the merry stench of cider and ale that were never less than suspiciously perfectly golden.
You might think that Adam’s only two choices of worlds would be the one that is his and the one where he was born - and the choice between those two would be pretty obvious when you got down to it, because Adam was born in Hell, which is always worse by definition. But it’s more complicated than that, as stories usually are, because there is really a ridiculous, incomprehensible number of other possibilities, and Adam wonders from time to time, not quite idly, if he is an Antichrist in all of them. It would be nice to find someplace where he was a little more ordinary, for relaxing short holidays if nothing else.
Dog always came along with him, which is why the strangest girl Adam ever met wasn’t disgusted by him. At least not at first.
The girl with the dark golden hair and the pine marten always around her-on her shoulder, at her heels-was the most fascinating creature Adam had ever seen, and that included Atlanteans and Tibetans as well as angels and demons and hellhounds and the Four Horsepersons of the Apocalypse.
Lyra was-not a girl per se, if Pepper were there she’d set him straight on that, a young woman--about his own age, and already she wore reading glasses on account of all the time she spent poring over books of strange symbols and an object that bore all those symbols on a round face like a watch or a compass. “It told me you were coming,” she’d said. “Told me somethin’ about who you are. But it wouldn’t tell me everything. I reckon you have to do that.”
But it was Lyra who did more of the talking. For someone so young she had no shortage of stories, and after a time Adam could only lie beside her and be lost in a place of polar bears who talked and wore armour, and witches who needed only branches to fly, and knives and specters and these strange beings, daemons. Adam grew to understand that the marten-who had a name, Pantalaimon, and could talk and certainly seemed to have quite the sassy mind of his own-wasn’t a pet or even really a separate creature at all, but a part of Lyra, part of her mind and her soul.
Adam, who knew more than he really wanted to about souls but not the specific things he wanted to know about souls, thought it would be terrifying to have part of your soul hanging around outside of your body like that-what if something happened to it?
(It was fortunate that in Lyra’s world, castration complexes were not much spoken of in the literal-minded way of Adam’s world.)
Lyra told him about Bolvangar and intercision.
Adam couldn’t really understand the horror of it, and he had no daemon to clutch closer in reaction-Dog played the role only so well and was, at the moment, engaged in some very personal hygiene-but he had Lyra nearby and so he reached for her hand, and was startled when he touched fur. Pantalaimon was leaning into his caress. Lyra’s eyes were bright and hungry in the twilight.
“You don’t touch somebody else’s daemon,” she whispered. “Not unless he touches you first.”
“He did touch me first! I didn’t mean to.”
“I know,” she said, and kissed him.
***
For nearly a decade Lyra had dreams.
We shall close them all, because if you thought that any still remained, you would spend your life searching for one, and that would be a waste of the time you have.
She had dreams where Xaphania had been wrong, wrong, wrong. Where there were doors upon doors that opened hidden in impossibly remote corners, and all the life of all the worlds depended on her finding an open doorway - and Will-once again.
Where a terrible urgency drove her to scratch with her nails at walls that should have been doors until the blood oozed from beneath her nails and Dust died as it fell, limp and grey in her hair like raining ashes.
She was never sure which was worse, the dreaming or the waking.
When she leaned close to Adam Young, she found the scent of his hair did not exist in her world. But she had smelled it before.
He didn’t look or sound or taste like Will, but when she closed her eyes and kissed him, the tiniest of windows opened between their lips.
She was awake and alert and alive, and she moaned softly to drown out the still little voice of Pantalaimon, who was probably going to tell her what she was wanting to do wasn’t fair or right, not to this young man who no doubt had problems of his own, not to Will, not to the worlds she could tear asunder.
Lyra thought that after all this time and all this pain, if she didn’t allow herself just a few precious moments of not caring, she would explode.
Adam responded to her with unhesitant, trusting pleasure. And Lyra remembered how it had been. And she began to feel the slightest restirrings of love, and she knew she could not trust them.
***
When Lyra’s anger broke loose, Adam only wanted to stand in its fury and calm it.
The strangeness of making love to a girl from another world never quite dispersed, though her lithe, strong body was completely normal, human and animal, smooth and heated. She slapped him, she gripped him, she rode him, and there was nothing in her fury and passion that Adam couldn’t withstand.
So he distracted her. So he stroked her and licked her and filled her and let her pin him down, and took his due turn pinning her down, and endured and and enjoyed the strange sensation of love-nips from a daemon. He knew he was being warned, and he didn’t care. Wanting was so dangerous for him, and he had come to resent that - no young man, in any world ever, has relished having to be careful when desire came upon him and overtook him.
He shuddered, he cried out, he loosed it all into her, and watched her moods play like moon-streaked clouds - first dark and now shining.
“I hate you right now,” she sobbed. He had no idea why. But maybe, she might as well.
***
They lay in each other’s arms in the twilight, sweaty and gleaming. Lyra stroked her fingertips of one hand through the golden curls on Adam’s head, and of the other through the matching fuzz at the base of his belly.
“I knew you weren’t from my world right off, even if the alethiometer hadn’t said. You don’t have a daemon. Not on the outside anyway. I’m sure Dog is a very nice dog, but…your daemon wouldn’t be a dog.”
“Why not? I like dogs.”
“Nothin’ wrong with them…but the people who have dog daemons are servants. You don’t serve, do you?’
“No,” said Adam, laughing. “I’m pretty sure I don’t.” But the realization was starting to sink in that, in fact, he did-at least where Lyra was concerned.
***
When a worried Mary Malone stepped into the used-book shop in Soho, she’d expected she knew what she was going to say to anyone who pressed her. It was going to involve quantum and be incomprehensible to virtually everyone in this world, with the exception of a few Nobel Prize winners and one poor sod who played with himself a lot on the Tube.
But when the grumpy shop-keeper, who appeared to Mary as he did to everyone, a textbook example of a specific sort of highly intelligent middle-aged Englishman who dwells perpetually in a remote past decade of discreet and genteel homosexuality, looked at her with uncanny eyes, what she blurted out was, “I feel a disturbance in the Dust.” It wasn’t a comment on his housekeeping.
He slapped a palm to his forehead. “Oh no, not this again.”
Not all angels covet human flesh. Some have been assigned to wear it and have grown accustomed to it, whether it fits like sleek Italian couture or an outdated but snug camelhair coat. Some have become even blasé about the idiocies the body’s wants can lead to (Even Marisa Coulter could never have seduced this one), but remain endlessly in awe of the capacity for mischief of the human mind. But one would have to be a particularly dense angel (as indeed, many angels are-but not this one, not usually, though he’d had his moments and also had a demonic counterpart who remembered every one of them) to have lived among people for so long without picking up a few tricks. Or learning that sometimes, rules were meant to be bent. (Perhaps it helped to be bent oneself.)
Aziraphale knew whom he wanted to tell first. He decided to tell that entity second.
***
As exhilarating as rejecting all the rules can be, if there are any reckless, hormonal young people in any world who know that action brings about reaction and that natural (and supernatural) laws have a way of defending themselves, it would be Adam Young and Lyra Belacqua. They both know more than they should about such things, in fact, and in reflection later on about how horribly it could have turned out, they realized they both got off lucky. Again.
Natural (and supernatural) laws, as it happens, like Adam and Lyra. Or at least some of the law’s agents see no purpose in taking a hard line when it’s really just a matter of youthful hijinks, and the poor girl especially has suffered enough, and besides, all that business of divine punishment and apocalypse-especially apocalypse--is simply too tedious to be borne.
The forest they had come through this time was gone, and they were standing in a long, long hallway. What they had taken for tree trunks in the haze were…shelves upon shelves of books, double stacked and sideways-piled. They went to the edge of the horizon and beyond, and as the silence started to fall, it was filled with something like a dry, rustly whispering.
“I’m sorry,” Adam said quietly. “I don’t think this is it. I don’t think that was the way. I don’t know where we are.”
Two plump and more or less-man-shaped shadows gradually took on more detail in the dim light. One was almost definitely a man. The other made Lyra flinch and snarl. For the other was squat and lumpy and covered in long orange fur, and Lyra had had quite enough of people with simian daemons to last her a lifetime, and just before she could have opened her mouth and used the ‘m’ word to the chagrin of the multiverse, Adam clenched her hand. Apparently he recognized the other, the nondescript gentleman of a certain age, as some glance passed between them and Adam whispered, “Please….sshhh.”
“Ooook!” said the ape.
Not a daemon.
Lyra thought she could see the man’s daemon now-there was a…yes, there it was, a yellow-eyed serpent of unremarkable size and colour around the man’s shoulders, mostly hidden as if cold-or perhaps mortified-beneath the man’s tartan scarf.
“Oooooook!” said the ape, a little more emphatically.
“What I think my associate is saying, dear girl,” said the man to Lyra, “is that he doesn’t think you look like much of a reader, and that you’d better not let any of that blood drip on the books while you’re looking.”
“Looking…for what?”
“Oook!”
“Lyra, er, this is Mr. Fell, he runs a bookshop in my world.”
“He’s attempting to be discreet, Lyra, but there’s no need for that now. You’d probably be more likely to believe me if I tell you that I’m the angel Aziraphale, this -“ he nodded to the snake, “is Crowley, and he’s a demon, not a daemon, if you get the difference, but he’s really quite a decent sort underneath”-the snake hissed loudly-“and this-“ he nodded at the orangutan, “is the Librarian, who as you probably gathered is not from this world and oh dear, he does seem to be getting more and more grumpy the longer he stays away from his home.”
“Pleasssse get to the point,” said the snake. (The fact that Aziraphale would have had a male daemon if he’d had one at all took Lyra by an utter lack of surprise)
“Are you going to-help her find Will?” Adam said incredulously, not sure whether to be relieved or betrayed. Perhaps a bit of both. As would be appropriate, come to think of it.
“Not directly,” said Aziraphale. “Wouldn’t dream of it. But it seems to fall to us to avert apocalypses, doesn’t it?….and, dear me, Xaphania is fond of that Atlantean wine, isn’t she? She’s quite willing to consider this business an accidental oversight, in advance. You really aren’t readers, are you?”
“Oook!”
“It seems to be true, Librarian. All the trouble they went to, all those worlds…and they’ve never heard of L-space.”
“I don’t ssssupposse there’ss much chance you know which book it isss sshe’d want?” said the snake, who was finding those whispering books deeply unsettling. But with Xaphania, the Angel of Anti-Climactic Narrative Exposition, sleeping off a traumatic hangover, Aziraphale was seeming to relish filling her sandals.
A sad, resigned, “Ooook.”
“Even he doesn’t know. It’s definitely one of them, though. Lyra seems a clever girl, I’m sure she’ll find it eventually.”
“It’s all right,” Adam said to Lyra, finally.
He could feel the heat of her tears from where he stood. The temptation to touch them was overwhelming, but he resisted, for he could feel that Lyra’s pride hung by the thinnest of threads and snapping it just wasn’t something decent people did, not in front of an angel and a demon and an orangutan.
“I am so sorry,” said Lyra quietly.
“It really is all right,” said Adam. “I know you tried…to love me. But I know you really love someone else more, and you can’t make yourself stop. You just can’t. It’s not your fault.”
“It’s not fair,” she said. “En’t none of it fair.”
“No, it’s not,” Adam said. “What happened to me when I had to, you know, save the world…wasn’t nearly as bad as what happened to you. I didn’t really lose anything. I can’t judge you.”
“No, I guess you can’t. But I can, and I don’t like myself very much right now. I thought I knew better. I really did, and then I forgot all about the rules, and…”
“Lyra,” Adam said softly. “Love doesn’t have any rules. So it’s hard for love to live in a place that has them. But that place is everywhere.”
(“How’d he get so smart?” whispered Crowley to Aziraphale.
“Well, we know it wasn’t our example,” whispered Aziraphale to Crowley.)
“I guess…I had better start,” said Lyra, but there was palpable doubt in her voice.
Pantalaimon circled her ankles morosely, and then looked up at her, black eyes glittering.
(He’d been silently trying to reassure Crowley that he wasn’t a mongoose.)
“Lyra,” Pan said quietly. “Wouldn’t we just be doing the exact thing we mustn’t do - wasting our time?”
(“Reading is never a waste of time,” huffed Aziraphale.
“That’s not what you said when the Left Behind books came out,” muttered Crowley.)
Lyra looked desolate and befuddled.
“You said you didn’t lose anything,” she said to Adam. It was an accusation.
“I didn’t,” he said sadly. “Not back then. But I think I have now.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“Don’t. Just don’t,” he said, and this time he did touch her face, thumb over those lips he had kissed so hard, now already starting to steel with resignation.
“Lyra,” said Pan. “If we can walk away now…we might be free. We didn’t have a choice before, but now we do.”
“At last,” she said.
“That’s all I did,” Adam shrugged. “I argued with some people. Got them to see my point of view, a little. And then, when there was more trouble coming…I realized I could just kind of walk away. So I did. And it saved the world but more to the point…I became a sort of different me, after that. A better one.”
“Oh, Adam,” Lyra said. “Adam.” What she didn’t say, but nearly everyone heard, was What if I had met you first?
“Ook!”
“What I think he said was,” said Aziraphale helpfully, “that no one is ever told what would have happened.”
~end~