To whom it may concern: Narnia, Gale, and anything else you recognize from the books belong to C.S. Lewis, his publishers, and his moviemakers. James belongs to a lass who goes by "the shadow proves the sunshine." I also go by Firiel on fanart-central and Lily of Archenland on TLC, so if one of my screen names ever happens to post this elsewhere please don't accuse me of plagiarism. Thank you. :) Now, presenting—
Shadowhoard
Chapter One: The House at Dusk
The last of the rain was clinging sadly to the windows of the old place. It was a cheery house, really, when it wasn't too empty or too dark. There was a reddish color to the tiles on the roof, and a homey green to the shutters on the windows, a small garden plot and a young tree out back, and just enough room inside for a fellow to live in it comfortably if he didn't have too much company. There was one spare bed in the attic by a gable window, and just now that was where the only light in the house was glowing.
Inside the attic a boy stood next to a sort of tall closet or cabinet set against the far wall. The candlelight showed a new set of worry-lines creasing his face before he turned his head away, tracing the wood grain of the furniture's door with his finger and remembering.
"What sort of wood is this anyway, sir?"
"Eh? What's that, James?" The old man stopped mid-monologue and the boy bit his tongue. He hadn't meant to interrupt. The man's bushy white eyebrows lowered at him, hut the blue eyes underneath were quizzical, not angry.
"The woodgrain in the wardrobe. I've never seen anything like it before. My father worked at a store that sold furniture for a while when I was small—before, I mean—and, you know, I've never seen anything like it."
The man's eyes grew distant, and at first the boy didn't think he would get any answer.
"I had this made from a tree that was very special to me when I was a boy," he said finally. "It was sort of a foreign apple tree."
James smiled as he thought of the Professor as a boy, swinging from the branches of a tree, or crunching into the sweet fruit, or maybe playing at hide-and-seek with someone, counting and leaning against its trunk. There had been a young girl playmate, he knew—the Professor had mentioned her many times—but he didn't know her name. And what had the Professor looked like when he was small? It was so hard not to picture him as just a miniature of what he was as an old man!
Then a different sort of picture flashed into James's mind. It was an older boy, almost the age he was now, with flyaway hair and a freckle-faced grin. The face would've been painfully familiar if it hadn't had the Professor's eyes.
"No," he said. "I won't go there. He's gone."
His fingers clenched into a fist.
"They're both gone."
It was true, after all. This empty, dim little house with tears of rain on its windows was not the Professor's anymore. The wardrobe made of foreign apple-wood was not the Professor's. It was his. But oh, how he missed him. The house was so empty with only one where there had been two. Even his room was big and empty without the knowledge of the Professor downstairs.
He stood up straight and marched over and pulled the curtains tight, then he started pulling covers off of his bed.
"James," he told himself, "it's alright to be silly if people can't see you." But what he was about to do didn't feel silly. It just seemed as if he was going to be closer to the Professor—or who he'd been as a boy—at least for one night. In the morning there were dull, sad things like paperwork to attend to, and the last ironing out with the Professor's lawyer of how he should handle this property as a minor with no particular relations. But tonight he could do as he wished.
He trundled an armload of sheets and quilts and pillows to the far side of the room, and stuffed them into the wardrobe floor beneath the fur coats. Then he walked back to the lamp and turned it off,, and groped over to his new bed and crawled inside. He pulled the doors shut around him—but not quite, you know, a fellow needed to breathe—and sniffed in the old smells and played in a whirlpool of bittersweet memories as he drifted off to sleep.