Disclaimer: I don't own the Chronicles of Narnia, or any of its related indicia.
Author's Note: This...is odd. First of all, the dialogue is slightly stilted for a reason - I'm attempting to capture a medieval, royal manner of speaking. Admittedly it's a rather simplistic technique that I'm using, I think, but there you go. Secondly, I'm playing with a lot of the things I like to do, and that means a lot of subtle detail.
So my challenge to you is: do you know what I'm up to? Can you figure it out? I'd love to hear what you think I might be playing with in this! :) Please review! It's always such a treasure to hear from you.
Edmund was bleeding, and he loved it.
He felt real. He felt human. He felt alive.
Edmund watched the blood mix in the stream. It was funny how his blood gave him life, but as soon as it escaped from his body it became a pollutant, revolted.
His side hurt, the stream was cold, and the current kept getting into his breeches and flooding down his leg.
Edmund knew he would be fine. The wound was shallow and as soon as he got himself onto dry land he could bandage it properly without the water getting into it. He'd just wanted to sit in the stream for a while, wash the wound out and watch the blood syphon away.
His hand was white, his long thin fingers very white against the light brown of his jerkin. The hand was holding up the fabric and armor, letting the wound irrigate. It was tired, that hand, but it was a faithful hand and Edmund was happy he had such a loyal hand.
Edmund laughed. The world was beginning to spin and tilt this way and that, like the sands in an hourglass congealing and loosening and sliding around in his morning cereal milk. A tree slowly toppled into his view, falling down, down, down and it was going to land on the leg, wasn't it?
He smiled, closed his eyes, and let the darkness collapse on him.
--------------
"It is just a fever," the nurse told Peter, but that didn't keep him from marching inside that ward and sitting sentry by his brother's bedside. He was almost nineteen and Edmund was fifteen now but he looked so much younger lying on that white cot. He almost looked like a little boy on a battlefield, slowly dying from a wound that was so, so similar to the one he had now. It taunted, haunted Peter, that gash on Edmund's side.
Edmund himself was sweaty and pale. He had not looked like that this morning. This morning, he had been all smiles and laughter, dirty jokes and all. Peter could remember him so clearly, so perfectly, cracking a joke and using his fork to accentuate the punchline. Edmund was never much for table manners when it was just the four of them. And what had he been eating? Peter thought it was fried potatoes, but it could have been ham. No, it was potatoes. It was definitely something you could cut up. Maybe it was a pancake.
It wasn't important, but it was so very important all at once. He had to remember everything about that Edmund he'd seen this morning. That image was so important. It had to replace the one in front of him. It had to, because remembering this sick boy in front of him forever wasn't something Peter could think he could do.
He knew he was overreacting, but it was better than watching Edmund sweat like a candle thrown into a fire.
Anything was better than watching his brother suffer.
----------------
Suspended by nothing in mid-air, Lucy was smiling. Edmund thought that was kind of odd for her to be floating around, especially in that bright orange dress. He'd never seen that one before.
Lucy waved and as she waved, her hand blurred and swirled into a large white dinner plate. Edmund thought that was kind of odd, too.
The plate that was once a hand was still attached to Lucy's swinging, waving arm, and as her arm swung one more time, it suddenly changed direction and swerved up to crash onto Lucy's head. The plate smashed soundlessly and when the pieces vanished into the darkness surrounding Lucy, Edmund saw that there was nothing where her hand should be. There was her arm, then her wrist, then nothing.
Lucy smiled again, and then she dissolved into a hundred shards of glass. Then they disappeared too, and the darkness collapsed in on Edmund's mind.
----------------
"How is he?" Susan asked from the doorway.
"You were not supposed to hear of this," Peter replied, rubbing his temples with large hands.
"But I have," Susan said quietly. She walked into the room and laid a hand on Peter's shoulder. "How is he?" she repeated.
"It is just a fever," Peter replied.
Susan watched her brother shiver underneath four thick blankets.
"Indeed," she whispered. Then she found a stool for herself and sat down next to Peter to keep vigil.
-----------------
There was an orb, a milky white orb in the far right corner of the blackness. Edmund couldn't look at it directly. He had to think of it like he was looking out of the corner of his eye - and then he could see it properly. For a moment, he thought it might be the moon, but then it began to splinter and crack like ice so it couldn't be the moon.
Once the pieces fell away, Edmund saw a face. At first he thought it was someone he knew, but it wasn't.
It was a woman, strangely enough. Even with all their diplomatic relations with other nations, Narnia didn't see too many humans, or even humanoid creatures. So to put it simply, she was a little odd.
The woman was crying, but she was smiling. She was dressed very oddly, for Narnian fashion. It seemed as if she had draped an orange baby blanket across herself like some sort of muumuu.
Her arm was akimbo at her side, jutting out at some sort of odd angle. It almost looked like she was reaching out for something, maybe someone else's hand. He could almost see it now, see the long thin white fingers grasping for her own.
Edmund thought she looked familiar somehow, but of course he hadn't seen her anywhere.
At least, not in Narnia.
When he tried to look at her fully, forgetting that he couldn't look straight on at anything in this darkness, she disappeared from his vision.
He kept trying to look at her like he did before, out of the corner of his "eye", but he couldn't find her, nor any trace of her anywhere in the blackness.
-------------------
Footsteps awakened Peter from his daze. He hurriedly wiped the drool off his chin and turned to the door, to the now-silent footsteps.
"Not you too," Peter muttered.
Lucy smiled sweetly.
"Does he require the cordial?" was all she asked.
Peter shook his head.
Susan, sitting next to Peter with her head up against the wall, snored loudly. Peter jumped. Lucy giggled lightly. As her soft laugh died in the air, she and her smile walked over to the window seat.
"It is just a fever," Peter told her.
Lucy just smiled, and watched her sleeping brother.
--------------------
And then Edmund saw a hand reaching out to him. Its whiteness struck out against the darkness like a white dinner plate on a black tablecloth. Edmund reached out for it - did he even have hands here? He wasn't sure, but he had to try to escape from this darkness somehow.
Just like that, he was in some plains somewhere, a field he had probably walked through countless times but didn't know the name of without consulting a map.
The woman was there, standing in front of him, smiling.
"Who are you?" Edmund managed to ask.
She just smiled and shook her head. The sun began to shine brighter. Edmund reached out for her with his long thin fingers, and as he did she began to trickle away, like trees' spirit forms' petals dancing away until only her eyes remained, suspended by nothing in mid-air.
The whiteness began to take over everything - the field, Edmund, her eyes - until there was nothing but the light and Edmund, unseen, crying somewhere within its resplendence.
--------------------
"The fever is breaking," Peter whispered to the sleeping Susan. She jerked awake and surged onto shaky feet. Lucy straightened up on the window seat.
Susan pressed her hand to her brother's soaked forehead. The sudden contact ended his moaning, bringing him into the bright light of the ward. His eyes fluttered open only to squint at the influx of so much light.
Lucy hopped off the window seat. Peter nearly knocked over the chair as he stumbled to his feet and to his brother's bedside.
"Is my nurse," Edmund croaked, "Is my nurse a woman?"
Lucy looked to Susan looking at a very confused Peter.
"No, Ed," he said. "Delilah is your nurse." At Edmund's confused look, he added, "The centaur."
"I know who she is," Edmund said quietly.
And as Edmund looked up at all of them, at Lucy's familiar smile, at Susan's familiar hands, at Peter's haunting blue eyes, he realized he had seen those features all before, in the darkness and now in the light, but moreover all in one person.
Now if he could only remember who she was.