Disclaimer: I am quite certain that I am a fourteen-year-old female who is very much alive, so no, I do not own the Chronicles of Narnia.
A/N: I really haven't much experience in writing, so input of any kind is greatly appreciated. Even if you hate it and can't read past the first paragraph or so, it would be quite helpful if you would let me know I'm doing something wrong so that I might improve.
The War was over, and the four young Pevensies (albeit a young that was altogether too old – or perhaps an old that was entirely too young?) were returning home.
Well, really, in their minds it was more of a matter of leaving home, and of being fully trapped in that enigmatic Other World that had feebly flitted through their thoughts, on occasion, over the past few years (or had it only been a few months, after all? – no, one must never think of that). It had become less and less of a field of concern after those first few months, and recollection almost completely failed them in the later years if they ever had cause to summon those old memories (which they seldom did). Monarchial duties left little time to wonder after distant notions of a Place they might have lived in as children before they came to Narnia.
Perhaps it was not a matter of leaving home at all. They had left home as soon as they fell through the Wardrobe (and oh, what a terribly hard fall it was, though the impact with the floor and each other was no cause for injury); there was a yawning chasm between one world and the next – fathomless, indomitable – and surely, any distance that a mere train could carry them was simply incomparable, else impossibly negligible.
No, it was that their fates in this world, this alien, unfamiliar Other world, seemed to be sealing rather quickly, and the only hope of returning to their world was rapidly growing father and farther as the train sped on. The dull English countryside was passing by much too quickly for anyone's comfort.
However, regardless of what was being left or returned to, there was still present the swiftly compounding issue of exactly what they were to do when the train (did it really need to be so fast?) reached Finchley.
There was no modicum of phrases akin to "There is the topic of," "That presents the conundrum that is," and "That begs the question of" being thrown hither and thither, despite the endless whispered preparations that had been made while at the Professor's house.
Incidentally, fortune had favoured them so, and they had been able to find a compartment to themselves.
The train began to lose speed.
"I regret to say that it seems our counsel is soon to meet its end."
"Oh, I do hope that our behaviour does not rouse suspicion!"
The boys remained silent, watching the window with slight trepidation – and yes, they were slowing down.
Rather than growing more fervent, discussion ceased at once as the four submitted to the confines of anxiety – confines that left little room for rational thought, much less articulate speech (speech that might have seemed a bit too grown-up for children, but that could be dismissed as a result of the War, and in any event, no-one was listening).
The rate at which time moved seemed to become inversely relative to the rate at which the train moved, and by the time it came to a stop, everything seemed to be moving at a dizzying pace.
Presently, they found themselves in total sensory overload as they stood at the train station with luggage in hand.
There were the trains. Oh, what monsters they were, with their screech of metal and how they belched their refuse into the air (as if it was not polluted enough; at least in the country it did not burn with every breath, even if it lacked the magic of Narnian air). There was the itch of their scratchy, too-heavy clothes that shielded them – to some extent – from the deplorable English weather. Colours were muted; sounds were too harsh; people were crowded too closely together; voices were too sharp. There was too much.
It was in these conditions that they searched for the woman they had not seen in nearly twenty years (by their reckoning, anyway).
Four sets of eyes searched the crowd for the anonymous face to which they attached vague memories of hugs and things too personal, too intimate, for someone who seemed such a stranger. Her appearance had been a point of mild contention – whose nose, whose eyes, whose hair? – the only thing that could be agreed upon regarding Helen Pevensie's person was dark hair and light skin. This, however, was not of much aid.
So, they sought from the masses around them any sense of recognition, and the lost look about them was not really pretending.
Peter froze, turning, hand clutching empty air at his hip (and oh, no, it was gone; where could it be?). The others, sensing his distress, tensed as well.
There was a hand at Peter's shoulder.
He jumped out of reach before he could consider whom the hand might belong to, and then fully faced the potential threat.
He found a woman with tears brimming at her eyes.
He swallowed.
She looked like Susan.
There were slight differences, of course; though her hair was dark, its texture was closer to his and Lucy's. Her nose was the same as Edmund's. Her lips were more defined than any of her children's, her jaw slightly more square. There were also the definite signs of age, though surely she could not have been much older than any of they were (it was still difficult to discount the years spent in Narnia).
Still, she was an unknown person in an unknown place, and he moved for Edmund to step forward. Edmund's judgment, he would trust.
Peter let out the breath he was holding when Edmund embraced the woman he knew to be their mother.
There was one obstacle fewer.
He unclenched the hand he had where Rhindon ought to have been.
They suffered their mother's (the word still seemed foreign) caresses and returned hugs of their own, shared their own enthusiastic exclamations of how very long it had been and how they had missed her so – and thus were their pretenses.
Peter found that, despite their planning, they really were not prepared.
Oh, yes, they had considered a great many things – at the insistence of Edmund and chiefly Susan, far more than Peter or Lucy might have done. Foremost was the speech and political conduct that would fully befit a Narnian sovereign, but which would be jarringly out-of-place in English schoolchildren. They had relearned the language, acquiring a wholly new vernacular. They relearned how to eat, how to walk, how to greet a stranger and how to greet a friend. They cast from them their Narnian habits, needing to do so and yet desperately wanting not to, for they also needed to remember.
However, even if their behaviours could pass as normal for people of this Place, it failed to do so for children and especially these particular children when being faced by their mother.
Helen noticed. She noticed at the train station; she noticed over the course of the next few weeks.
There were changes that she could attribute to their time spent in the country, and changes she tried to, but which would never quite fit. There were good changes – oh, yes, there were good changes. Her children were closer than any she had seen. They never fought, and when they disagreed on something, they discussed it respectfully until they came to a compromise that satisfied every party as best as could be achieved. They deferred to and trusted each other implicitly. Though it stung her to realise, each of them seemed to need little else than his or her siblings.
They also appeared to respect her wishes more – Edmund never argued like he used to, and Lucy did not once cry or pout – but they did not seem to like her as they once did. Their interactions with her were polite, cordial, but stilted, lacking genuine fondness. She would hear their laughter, their nostalgic conversations about things she failed to understand, and the grins would fade when she entered the room. The joy they shared with each other was something that she could never come close to, a great and wonderful secret that she would never know. They had grown up together in the months they spent in the country, and it hurt that her children might never truly return to her.
Then, there were the changes that confused her. One was the change in their accents. Their words were softer, more flowing; the only comparison she could call to mind that seemed appropriate was what little Latin she had heard spoken. It baffled her how their speech could change as such – she knew Professor Kirke, and she had met Mrs. Macready, and the Scottish burr they shared was nothing like her children's new, aberrant diction.
There were also strange coins of speech that she wondered at; she sometimes heard them swear on something called Aslan, and several exclamations of "By the lion!" and "Lion alive!" were made. (The latter, she noticed, was borne by Edmund with particular gravity.)
Her children were so very different. Edmund could not stand Turkish Delight; Susan had to avert her eyes whenever she was near a mirror; Peter became uncharacteristically frustrated whenever something was too heavy for him to lift or too high for him to reach; Lucy's tears were born of the grief of a woman who had lost something most extraordinarily dear to her.
She noticed. Oh, she noticed.
When Robert Pevensie returned home a month later, he noticed, too.
He noticed things his wife did not; he noticed things that only a soldier would. The night-time groans from his sons and his littlest daughter – innocent, little Lucy, not so innocent any more – were familiar to him; he had heard them many a night in France. They were the sounds of old wounds that still brought pain, and the haunted sounds from wounds that neither bled nor fully healed.
Their reactions when startled were not unknown to him, either. He knew that response, the rush of adrenaline, and had seen it in others – in soldiers. It was the result of years of honing one's reflexes, of being conditioned to the idea that an enemy could be upon one at any given moment, and mere seconds could determine the difference between living and dying. It perturbed him completely, therefore, when he watched his children snap to rigid attention, hands flying, he knew, to weapons they no longer carried, and eyes tinged with fear before they realised their safety.
He saw the scars. He saw the horrible webs of puckered whites, reds, and purples that covered the limbs and torsos of his sons when they thought he was not by, when by some miracle they did not notice that the door was slightly ajar, nor that it had opened slightly further. He heard them map out the scars, tell their stories – this one from a minotaur, this one from a wolf, this one from a giant and this one from a witch – and he wondered if this was the game Helen had mentioned, if they had mutilated themselves so terrifically for the sake of a game. He hoped that it was a trick of the light, that they had somehow used make-up to replicate such horrendous things, but he knew that it was not so, that he was lying to himself, and so never reprimanded them for treating such things so lightly, for acting as though doing such things was merely playing. Part of him knew it was real, but he could not accept it. He could not confront them about it; perhaps if he did not, he would forget and it would no longer be real.
He could not help but wonder on that day, undetected in the hallway outside of Peter's room, if his daughters had suffered similarly to his sons.
Helen and Robert sought explanations, once. They gathered the children and demanded answers to what happened in the countryside. Their children exchanged looks, silently deliberating, and it was Lucy who spoke.
"We can't tell you."
Helen very much wanted to know exactly why not, and winced slightly when she said so more harshly than she had intended. She was surprised, however, when her eight-year-old showed no upset, only stony resolve.
"Even if you were to believe us, an event I find unlikely – no, don't protest – I sorely doubt you would understand. It wouldn't be of any help to you," at this point, she raised a hand in a silencing gesture when she rather thought her mother still looked argumentative, "You will know, eventually. It may not be even at some point in either of your lives; it may not be 'some day' or 'in time,' but trust me when I say that at some point, somewhere, your questions will have been satisfied."
This left both parents in stunned silence, and with that, their children (though that description seemed no longer to fit) retired.
A/N: I hope that my liberal use of parentheses and italics didn't make it too difficult; I started out trying for a rambling, child-like narration but fear I did not utilize it too well. Review, if you please!