"So what's that one, then?" Jill asked indignantly. "Don't tell me it's another constellation of Ed or Susan because there can't honestly be that many, Scrubb."
Eustace sighed and rolled his eyes. He was suddenly grateful for the cover of night, because otherwise Jill would have knocked his lights out for rolling his eyes at her. He squinted up at the stars. Narnian stars were so much brighter than Earth stars. So much more alive. It probably had to do with the pollution thing on Earth, but luckily for Eustace his parents were the type of people who were eco-friendly and vegetarians and whatnot, so he didn't feel guilty about contributing to the cloudy, ugly night sky that was brown when it should have been black and dead when it should have been alive.
But he was in Narnia now anyway, so he didn't have to worry about that.
"For the record, Pole, I named only six and a half Edmund constellations, seven of Lu and Susan each, and eight of Peter—the magnificent." He snickered.
"Well, Eustace the annoying—"
"Really? You can't come up with a more imaginative name that that?"
"—I asked you to show me classic Narnian constellations that you know, and you have not lived up to that."
"Hey!" Eustace protested. He rolled over and propped himself up on one elbow, glaring at her. "I am showing you the stars."
Jill's aggravated sigh was punctuated by a snore from Puddleglum.
"You're making those up, though," Jill said huffily. "There can't be six and a half designs of Edmund in the sky, anyway!"
"How do you know?" Eustace asked.
"For one thing, they're all just blobs. In the sky." She gestured to the whole entire landscape, as if encompassing everything in her complaint about Eustace's lack of constellation knowledge. "That certainly doesn't look like Peter. Unless your cousin has four heads and two tails, that's not him."
Eustace scowled and flopped back onto his back. "Fine. You win, Pole. I made all those up."
"I knew it." Jill sounded far too pleased. "They don't look like anything."
"Not everything is how it looks."
Jill turned to him. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"Don't judge a book by its' cover? Think before judging?" At Jill's blank expression, he sighed theatrically. "It means the stars may look like floating pieces of Aslan's mane, but really, if you look, they're something else."
He could tell that Jill was studying the night sky suspiciously. She reached out a hand as if to touch it. "Then what is it?"
"On my first trip here—" He ignored Jill's good-natured groan; he had started many longwinded stories this way "—We went to an island. This was Ramandu's Island, and, as you already know, Ramandu was a star."
"Which, as you already know, is impossible."
"I said the same exact thing, or close enough." Eustace wondered absently if Ramandu was up in the sky right now, watching as they tried to rescue his grandson. "In our world, Pole, the stars are balls of fiery, flaming gas. In this world, that's only what they're made of. Not what they are."
It was silent for a while as Jill processed this. He was acutely aware of her little finger brushing his little finger as she contemplated the sky. He edged away imperceptibly so this wouldn't continue to bother him and tie his stomach in knots for some strange reason.
"Then what are they?" she whispered.
Eustace allowed a small smile to flit across his face. "Whatever you want them to be, I suppose."
"Well, then." Jill squinted hard. "That's Reepicheep, the mouse warrior you're always talking about."
"What? No way. I was going to say it was Puddleglum."
"Puddleglum? Are you crazy? Puddleglum's more lanky, not round. Get your facts straight."
"For the record, Reep was a very tall mouse."
"Yeah, sure. Okay, that one there, um, that's Trumpkin then."
"See, now that should be Puddleglum. Don't you see the pessimistic-ness practically radiating from those stars?"
"There's so many things wrong with that, Scrubb. One, pessimistic-ness is not a word. Two, stars wouldn't radiate that anyway because they're beautiful. Three, what is with you seeing Puddleglum in all the stars?"
And on it went.
Eustace and Jill bickered about the constellations for some time until they settled on an agreement. There were two constellation each of The Kings and Queens of Old (though Eustace swore that one of the Peter ones was of Caspian), two Caspian's, and one Dawn Treader. There was also one of Tumnus the faun—or any faun, really, because they'd never seen him and the infamous beavers. The one that had taken the longest time to settle on was Reep's, but they both agreed in the end that the moon was more Reepicheep-like than any pattern of stars. Finally they ruled out Puddleglum as a candidate because, as Jill had logically pointed out, he wasn't a hero yet, and only heroes made it into constellations.
"Think we'll ever be up in those stars, Scrubb?" she asked later, her little finger gone back to touching his, but he didn't mind it so much now.
"Of course. We'll be heroes here someday, Pole."
She sighed contentedly and raised her hand—he sorely missed her little finger—and looked as if she was painting the sky.
"You know who I just found up there?" she whispered. "Aslan."
o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o
I couldn't resist putting hints of Eustace x. Jill in there. /shot
Takes place during The Silver Chair.
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