A/N: An FYI on personal head-canon regarding Narnia; I fell in love with the books long before the Disney movies came out, so my Narnia is mostly book-verse with bits and pieces of the movies that I like mixed in. (The LWW movie is my favorite; it kept to the spirit of Narnia better than the other two, imho.)
Have a Heart That Longs Eternal
It's the sky that gets you.
After the adrenaline wears off you're left with cold reality, and it sets in that you're stuck here. The stone pillars and marble floors and tapestried walls begin to feel like a cage, so you slip through hallways you can't keep straight yet and find an open terrace you can escape to.
You wrap your thick cloak around you (trying to ignore how rich it feels) and look up at the stars.
And that's when you break.
The stars are all wrong—all the pinpoint lights you're used to searching out on clear nights at home are not there or in the wrong place or brighter or duller than they're supposed to be. It hits you how foreign this place really is and you begin to lose your nerve.
But Time is your greatest ally as well as your worst enemy, so you spend the next several weeks staring up at the stars to memorize them so they don't feel so strange anymore. Days and weeks turn into months and years and you learn the names of these stars better than you ever knew the stars of your home, and soon even the word home changes meaning.
Then you tumble through another door and, once more, without your consent, everything changes.
At first it's not so bad. You're in your own old clothes and living in the Professor's old house and there's the same old war happening and you feel like you never left.
You still like to stargaze, though, so you go outside and look up.
They're achingly familiar but they're not the same and you begin to realize the truth.
You won't ever be home. Never again. Your heart's split in two and no matter where you are or what you do it won't feel right.
But you pretend it's not like that, that you don't miss the way the grass and leaves felt beneath your feet in the spring, that it doesn't bother you to be part of a country you can't fix, watch a war you can't be part of, to know people you once could have saved are dying.
You pretend you don't know what it feels like to save the world.
You catch the others sometimes, staring out of a window or reacting in a way that is very much Narnia and very much not English, but you never talk about it. It all still hurts too much too deeply.
Until one night you seek out the stars again and there, under a black velvet sky sprinkled with silver shards, all the hurt and confusion and longing knots itself into cold anger that settles in the pit of your stomach and makes you sick.
Anger at yourself—you left, what are you people going to do now?—and maybe, just maybe, if you'd wished harder and not been just a little glad to come back, the wardrobe would have let you through again.
Anger at Him—He knew you needed to be there, knew you needed Him, how could he strand you in a place of brick and barbed wire and sirens where the trees couldn't walk and the sky couldn't sing and why show you all that in the first place if He was just going to take it all away—
Professor Kirke drops down beside you. He almost startles you, but you've trained yourself to control your reactions and it's a habit that's never quite worn off.
"I know how you must be feeling," he starts, and you want to shout No! You weren't there for years and years, you didn't have a life there, you didn't heal a war-torn long-oppressed kingdom…
"I didn't understand either. Took me years, really. There was too much of me mixed up in too many different places. Do you know what it is to see a world created?"
You have to admit he's one-upped you there.
Professor Kirke gently places a book in your hands. "It might help," he tells you. "Helped me. It's worth a try, at any rate, eh?"
You're just desperate enough to actually accept it.
You recognize it of course, The Book, but you've never paid much attention.
The picture painted in words is all too vivid now, though. Every word strikes deeply into your heart and every time you open it you feel like you're looking into His eyes again.
Slowly you begin to realize that you're still not home, and you may never be again for the rest of your life, but somehow you wouldn't trade this unsettled restlessness for anything in all of two worlds.
You stare up at the sky and smile, because knowing Him has been worth every bit of it.