once
He bites his lip at dinner, and his eyes widen in surprise as a trickle of blood runs down his chin, reminding her of the terrible sight of him wounded in the North, of the way he coughed and coughed as his lifeblood spilled over his tunic, bubbling up from some wellspring of hurt inside his chest. He wipes it away and forgets an instant later, and she remembers Lucy's face as she knelt to pour a drop of her cordial into his mouth, and he was the strong and golden eldest again, and she did not have to be.
twice
The earth is warm beneath her bare feet in the garden of the Professor's house, and it is on impulse that she pulls a sprig of ivy from the side of the house and twines it into a circlet. She decorates it with sweet sticky honeysuckle and tiny daisies, but she ignores the roses that bloom by the side of the path – after all, they have thorns which would scratch her skin and tangle in her hair, and she does not want that. She adds the finishing touches and places it oh-so-gently on her brow, but it does not fit.
thrice
James calls her beautiful as he pulls her closer for a kiss in the back seat of his automobile, and the stubble of a beard on his cheek is rough under her delicate fingertips, his mouth smeared lurid scarlet with her lipstick. She is far from gentle now and she doesn't mind at all, and when he asks her to come over to his flat the next evening she agrees without a moment's hesitation. When Peter calls in the morning she tells him to leave it for tomorrow, but he goes to the train station and never calls her back.
AN: This was both my first published Narnia fic and my first series of drabbles. Each of those was exactly one hundred words long, and that was pretty tough. Anyway, please review whether you liked it or not, because if you did that's always really nice to hear and if you didn't I would like to know what I did wrong, so I can fix it.
