The Chronicles of Spare Oom
*Chapter 1-Freedom*
Hey everybody :D This is the first installment of my collection of oneshots, "The Chronicles of Spare Oom" As the title says, these oneshots will mostly follow the Pevensies' lives in England, although it will have tidbits of other characters, both Narnian and not.
And without further buildup, I give you your feature presentation- Freedom. Enjoy and review :)
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For the longest time, Edmund Pevensie had endured the oppressive sensation of being chained up. The young boy did not really know where or why it started, but he had carried around that feeling ever since the first threats of war were whispered among the neighbors. Of course, the feeling had only increased when an actual war had broken out; even doubling tenfold when his own father was sent away to fight. Edmund could never really say exactly when the cold, oppressive chains first bound themselves around him, for tensions in all of Europe had been high for countless seasons by that point. It was long enough though, that these feelings had become all he knew.
Edmund's feelings of suffocating captivity started to effect his relationships with his family. He started arguing with his older brother, Peter; their more recent fights had been so bad that Edmund had started to feel nothing but hatred towards his one and only brother. Although his relationship with his elder sister, Susan, remained the least changed, he did pick up the habits of mocking her(both behind her back and more often than not to her face) and looking with scorn upon anything she did. The only words he spared for his only younger sibling, Lucy, were always cold and sneering, and were almost always being used to tease her cruelly for one thing or another. And for his mother? Edmund rarely ever spoke to her.
When Edmund and his siblings were evacuated from London during the night raids by the Nazis, his feeling of suffocation was so fierce that he thought it would surely be the death of him. His relationships with his siblings were now purely hateful and full of only harsh words and long, cold silences. Even Susan had withdrawn from him at that point. Edmund had felt so utterly and completely alone that the chained feeling only increased all the more.
But that all changed when Lucy found the wardrobe.
When she had first shown up, red faced and bright eyed, gushing about some magical land called Narnia, Edmund hadn't believed her one bit. None of them had. But when he later followed her with the intentions of mocking her, only to stumble upon the land himself, he had found he had no choice but to believe. Not long after that did Susan and Peter also find themselves thrust into the magical land, and that was when the real adventures began for the four.
But for Edmund, something changed when he made the transition from wardrobe to woods. It was a subtle, unattainable feeling at first, that nonetheless lasted with him and only intensified as their time in Narnia went by. Even during his captivity with the White Witch, with all the horrors that that brought to him, it lasted. Edmund wasn't even aware the change was taking place inside him until that fateful morning when he had been rescued from the Witch's camp and found himself for the first time in the presence of Aslan; then, and only then, did he place what the change inside him was.
Being in Narnia, Edmund realized when looking into the amber eyes of the Great Lion, had helped him shed the chains which had bound him for so long. With amazement, he realized his heart felt light instead of burdening, his head felt clear instead of hazed, his breath felt fulfilling instead of laborsome. For the first time in a long time, Edmund wasn't bound and caged. When he was in Narnia, he was free.
