R&R, please. My first fanfic on this site :D Does anyone think the different tenses are really weird? I tried to keep it consistent but it didn't feel right . . . just ended up letting it come out as it sounded best. Comments and advice thoroughly needed and appreciated :) Also, I do not own any characters or the story or any of that shizz. It's all CS Lewis . . . Enjoy.
The Queen is fifteen. Just fifteen years old, when she is flung back into that realm of dreams and shadows for the third and final time. Just fifteen years old when she is forced to say goodbye to the home she was never meant to have. Just fifteen years old when Destiny – or one might say, the great Lion – broke her heart.
It was like a bittersweet daydream, waking up for the first time in the cabin of the Dawn Treader. She rolled the beautiful, melancholy name on her tongue. Dawn Treader. The ship that walks with the dawn and with the morning sunlight, as it glints of the faraway ocean horizon. The Queen remembers how, on that first day, she was treated like a Goddess in her own palace. She remembers how he gave her his own cabin, and how he laughed his glorious, soft laugh when she wore his tunics. They were sewn of deep crimson and turquoise and emerald velvet, and embroidered with shining silver thread, woven with moonlight. The captain had described their route towards the edge of the world, and she had felt a thrill of passion and excitement that reminded her of the great adventures they had had in the days of Cair Paravel, when they had been the High King Peter and Queen Susan and King Edmund and Queen Lucy.
Now she feels empty and broken, because she had been allowed back into that place only to say goodbye to the first person she had fallen in love with.
The Queen remembers standing on the deck with him. His eyes were deep blue, and his hair sandy brown, blowing in the night breeze as they lean over the carved railing aft of the ship. He is nineteen years old and has reigned for just three years, but in that time he has grown to the stance and majesty of the greatest Emperor ever to rule Narnia. The Queen compares him to her brother the High King, and wonders who would have won, if it had been this man Peter had been battling that day at Aslan's Howe, and not his uncle.
He rests his forearms on the railing and she stands back, her heart throbbing and churning as she surveys this perfect night, with him at the centre of it. The endless water reflects the indigo sky and the full, golden moon gleams like a medallion on a sheet of deep blue silk. And there, far above the horizon amongst her star children, the Lady Alanvil glows silver in the halls of high Heaven. The night would be so perfect, if only . . . if only.
"Lucy," he whispers to her. But it's not a whisper. It's a breath, slipping from his lips like water, or fluid silk. And then their mouths are together and she can feel his coarse, thick mane between her fingers and she could be flying, because he fills her with strength and joy right from the tips of her fingers to the very ends of fine, pale gold hair.
Afterwards she imagines their children, golden haired and laughing his soft laugh. They'd have his eyes, too – so deep and blue they remind her of the sapphires in her coronation ring. They'd go on adventures on this magnificent ship, and sail to the end of the world together.
The Queen laughs to herself. That could never have been, for at the end of the world they were forced to part and the last she saw of him was his torn, angry face. The face she could never see again, for she was going where he could never follow. She says, as she clings to the Lion for the last time, "Will I ever see him again? Is this the end?" But the Lion shakes its glorious mane, and then they're gone, and she has been banished forever.
She gazes at the wardrobe in the spare room. Once a King or Queen of Narnia, always a King or Queen, she reminds herself, as tears form and, somewhere in another world that one can reach only by magic, he forgets.
For goodness sake, people. You know how it goes. Leave a message :)
