As You Were
**
The fire is going out, and oh, isn't that just perfect. The ashes give a dying glow that scatters to embers on the wind, some of them lighting on the back of his hand before he can snatch it away. Eustace hisses in pain, tears stinging his eyes, almost dropping the sword that he's balanced across his knees
And with that, the fire is dead. He doesn't really care.
More insurgent than he's ever been, Eustace picks up his sole weapon, unsheathes it, and smiles, grim and humorless. He and Jill had both wanted it…well, too bad. He's the one who knows how to use it. He knows what to do if- if—
He let's that thought go unfinished. No one, nothing in their right mind could be lurking with them in this wasteland.
Eustace still doesn't know why he's set himself up to this nightwatch.
He sits back against the cliff, and takes in the every shadowed rock of this gorge, and the stars silent above them. The bone-deep tiredness is flaring up somewhere inside, all his strength soaking out into the rocks and crags. It's not going anywhere; he'll need all of it tomorrow. Even with the moon vanished, everything looks tempestuous glaring white, and Eustace glares right back.
Aslan asked us to, Aslan wouldn't do that if there was so little chance...and Aslan wanted us to...he wanted us to-- "I am Eustace," he forces, coldness stinging his throat, "who was sent to find," he pauses almost alarmingly, "P..Prince Rilian of Narnia!" Eustace stops and lets that thought, that name, drift into some pin-point distance. As if that could mean something; anyone could speak a name he didn't know.
And he keeps his eyes trained on the northern lights. That's right, he thinks, and doesn't wonder about the odd tingling before his eyes, that Lady on the bridge, her smile, her beguiling voice...he pushes the vision back for some reason, and tells himself no, we've just got to go.
What's gone wrong with him, anyway?
All the lost years catch up to him suddenly…he can't possibly be this young. He feels ancient and contrary as the cruel wind as though the much-better part of him is still on the Dawn Treader scaling storm-battered wood with wind, salt and rainwater in his mouth, a monster to slay and countless voices, lost in a howl of wind, yelling at him to turn back.
Even here, the windstruck crags at his backs, he can just see his cousins' faces when he tells them. Edmund will be smiling, a little sad, Eustace, only you would ask to go back; would lapse into silence as he listened and Lucy will stroke her cousin's hand and say, But Eustace, of course he was calling you back. He almost hears himself speaking to them, but he couldn't tell a story straight if his life hung on it.
We followed Signs...at least I think we did. We went North to find Caspian's son. But oh, Caspian? He's ancient. Dying. Wish you'd been there.
Eustace chokes on a derisive laugh and cuts his imaginings short. No wonder they'd all been knights and royalty and he isn't. He's ruddy hopeless at courteous subtlety, nobody could call him anything but--
I'm the King's man.
And there's that.
He's almost forgotten.
But even the back of his mind is cold and stings with ice; Eustace furiously holds up his hands against his warm breath. They chafe so badly. He'll melt away this numbness and be done with it, and maybe it will start to mean something again, in the warmth and blaze and fireplaces of Harfang.
Deep, deep in some unbound part of him, he doesn't really believe that. He's just too tired and furious to fight for what he does know. The truth is, he has never done anything for anyone in his life and it's too easy to feel like he can.
Eustace turns away, looks ahead. Light, warm as blazes, windows cavernous. That's all, that's all, and maybe he'll be ruddy sane again.
What am I doing here? he thinks ruefully. What am I doing here? He grits his teeth and cringes imagining a pair of beady, discerning eyes boring through him. I'm sorry, Reep. I'm a sad excuse for a knight after all. Turns out I can't do anything absolutely mad, and call it an adventure.
He rakes his eyes over the figures of Puddleglum and Jill, shivering in their sleep. He knows he can't tell them all this, is incredulous that he even wants to.
Here now, he can't fade behind anybody. There's no one to follow, no one to tell him what to do. He has to keep them going, it doesn't matter where, and the things he says to Jill and Puddleglum, his cutting words... well if he can change things, he has to be someone, even if that someone is—
Eustace shuts his eyes, and the missing years come back again.
It's never hard to forget that two months ago, he was a boy too spent on making everything about himself. And in one blink, he's back on the ship after Dragon Island; Caspian speaking rather solemnly to him. I think, the King says seriously, that you'd been lonely before. I know how that is. Eustace looks at him, mouth half open, before muttering, Well, I don't…I don't…I didn't really think you were a tyrant.
Caspian laughs out loud, all youth and dauntless spirit.
-And Eustace tenses, like he's been burnt again. It still hurts to think of Caspian, the then-young King he'd been.
Unwillingly, his hands go tight-knuckled on the sword he's holding, and he remembers the first time he took one in both hands, Ow, it's blasted heavy!
Caspian, in Eustace's memory, smiles back with blue eyes glinting. It always does at first. It's my second best one, mind you! With that, he all but commands Eustace to take up that second-best sword and gives him the first duel of his life. Eustace is black and blue by the end of it, but uncomplaining for once in his ten years. Caspian taught him that, without holding back one bit.
And maybe he was brittle, all skin and bones, but Eustace had learned.
It's not trickery, Eustace, it's skill. You'll get better, mark my words.
Eustace breathes hard, and doubts that more than he ever has. And suddenly in his mind, the ringing clash of the swords is like a taunt.
He knows-
-that wasted, ancient King on his last voyage is Caspian, and they're almost without a hope of bringing back his only son. All three of them are dying slow deaths here, he thinks, gorges and evil spells and who knew what else. They aren't passing through this blasted plain, they're fighting it, and it's fighting them to the bone, and it could kill them tonight, tomorrow, any living moment-
Find the lost prince, or die trying.
He thinks vaguely of the strange knight, and that lovely, lovely lady. The wind is growing colder now, it's in his bones. Soon this bitterly changing air will turn cruel and Eustace thinks he deserves it. His reckless thoughts mutter that he shouldn't have come, should never have stepped forward and declared himself the king's man.
Who was he to call himself that, anyway?
Eustace stares bleakly at the dismal lands, and the coming storm tear into his skin. It's no match for the shame.
Caspian would not have stood for that. No, he would have cuffed Eustace hard on the back, and told him otherwise. Because Caspian was just that way. Even after all this, he'd would be far from dispirited, he'd find some way to laugh.
He thinks of the musty ship cabin again, Caspian keeping them up at unholy hours of the night, and Eustace telling him to shut up now, we all need our sleep, and even Edmund barely holds back a yawn, but Caspian goes on, his idle voice slipping through old childhood tales, and all his mad, slapdash theories about their own world in England until Eustace shakes his head and laughs at the memories, weak and low, and as soon as he starts he can't seem to stop.
He's suddenly slumped against the rock face, laughing till his chest hurts, and he thinks, this kingdom has finally driven him mad, like he always said it would. His head reels, and there's a blur over his eyes. Eustace tilts his head up and wipes tears of insane mirth away. Somehow, he hopes that's all they are.
Because, damn it all, he still wonders - he's been wondering all along-
-why did Caspian come to this fate, losing everything, dying alone—why Caspian?
Those terrible things couldn't—shouldn't ever befall someone who never deserved one scrap of them. Eustace inexplicably thinks of something that his father used to tell him, Son, that's the way of the world, sometimes. Yes, bad things don't spare good people, and nobody ever said that life dealt equal cards--
"Oh, shut up," Eustace whispers, and the tears run down his face. "Not in this world, it can't be!"
Stupid, selfish little boys are altered by the great Lion in this world. Young princes can take down wicked conquerors, in this world.
But Winter has also trapped a kingdom for hundreds of years, in this world; warriors die young with swords at their throats; and brave lords can be turned into dragons and nightmares and lifeless gold..
Eustace gets to his feet, sick and unsteady. He can't seem to think straight. It's the same, it's all the same. But it's his dream-nightmare country now.
In his mind, he and Caspian cross blades in the dying sun. In his mind, Caspian steps back, looks Eustace fierce in the eyes, and tells him he'll do just fine.
It's done with complete instinct, but also, with something that makes him feel warm and strong. Eustace picks up his fallen sword, unsheathes it in one fell motion, and under the unforgiving sky, up against the howling wind, he kneels.
"I am Eustace," he whispers, and drives the sword into the unyielding ground. "Who journeyed with my King to the isle of Ramandu, and followed him on to the Edge of the World."
Later on, this is what Eustace will remember about this night: the cold, the loneliness, but also the absolution. If he ends up in pieces at the bottom of some gorge, or ripped apart by some evil, beastly things, he can die saying that he was never doing this for anyone else—
This is what he'll be telling himself when he gives himself to hope for the Lion's voice in the dark, when the Lady's evil enchantment flares all around him, when the underworld crumbles and all their barriers fall away-
-this is what he tells himself now, as he crawls beside Jill into a half-frozen blanket, and shivers in the cold.
Tonight, Eustace spirals into sleep and dreams of nothing at all
***
A/N: This was an experiment with present tense. I've always found it so touching when Eustace comes at Caspian with open arms at the end of Silver Chair-because a) it's one of the few open gestures of affection in CoN, b) it's made by Eustace, of all people.