To Break Their Sleep
Narnia/The Dark is Rising crossover, for lettersandliars

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Will Stanton and Peter Pevensie find themselves sharing a room their first year of university. When Will's family comes to help move him in it's the longest train of people Peter's seen in a long while, and when they're done Will apologizes for the insanity but Peter laughs reassuringly and makes a joke about how if they would've stood evenly spaced out between the car and his room they probably could have just handed each other things all the way up the stairs without taking an step. Will laughs, easy, and it's a pretty good start.

-

Going out into London once they meet this albino fellow Bran, utterly strange coincidence says Will, but Bran doesn't seem surprised by the surprise of seeing Will. He's loud and jolly enough, and Peter knows that normally Will is a little cowed by the type but this guy riles him up and soon they are laughing uproariously as they recant some memory of puncturing a furious Welshman's tires. Peter can't help but join in the merriment and thinks this Bran fellow must be an awful influence on Will, who is normally the type to meet deadlines and do all his reading and keep his head down.

He likes that about Bran, and buys him a drink for it.

Many drinks later in their room they're talking about swords, of all things, because that's what Peter misses right now, and the weight of a crown, and Bran is oddly receptive and keeps talking about fencing, but once Will leaves to take a piss Bran leans across the bed and tells him about this one sword he once had that was made by the Light for King Arthur.

And Peter says, Oh that's funny, because I got mine from Father Christmas.

They smirk at each other but somehow they don't much have the heart to laugh.

-

Peter writes his siblings often, and his letters are all very different. Lucy's are about normal things like school and home and peppered with shared memories of Narnia, Edmunds include long passages quoted from books, and Susan's are the ones that hurt Peter most because he can tell how hard she is trying. I took Jane shopping today, she says. I tried to get Lucy to come along but she was buried in her book. Jane has a younger brother you know, he's an artist, I think Lucy would take to him so well but she doesn't care for people anymore. She's too young to resign herself to spinsterhood. Peter reads, I miss my little sister, but doesn't know if Lucy can see that. What can he do, from so far away? In some ways it is harder, but in other ways it is much, much easier. He writes regularly, weekly, nothing more and nothing less.

-

Peter goes home with Will one holiday - it's only a short one and his parents and Susan are in America and he really doesn't want to stay with Uncle Harold and Aunt Alberta even though he'd like to see Edmund and Lucy, but when Will invites him and Will's mother assures him over the phone that they would love to meet him and no it wouldn't be a burden at all, what's one more mouth among ten or twelve and Max is gone anyway, Peter accepts. He feels a little bad about abandoning his siblings to Eustace but they can take care of themselves, and he's taking care of himself by escaping to the Stantons' where he can pretend for a little bit that he's part of a normal family, and the noise will drown out his endless thoughts.

So the Pevensies return the favor - his mother insists that they do so, "That poor Mrs Stanton has enough mouths to feed, it's the least we can do to make it an even exchange."

Lucy takes to Will and Susan is coy with him, but Will is little more than politely charming and soon engaged with Edmund on some topic of anthropology they're mutually fascinated by, but which bores the rest of them severely until Mr. Pevensie interrupts and asks Will about Buckinghamshire.

After dinner they sit in the parlor, Susan with her knitting, and Lucy with a book, while Peter suggests a card game. Edmund suggests they teach Will something called Faun's Jig and Lucy chimes in with "oh yes!" and joins them.

"And, do you remember when Mr. Tumnus would -"

"When you lost that horse to -"

Peter initially tries to stop this sort of talk in an effort to be polite, but Will seems intrigued, asks questions, and that's enough to make them quiet. Oddly rude, he thinks, for such precocious youth.

Eventually Lucy lets the word slip: "But I heard it wasn't Narnia's originally -" and Susan scoffs and says "Will doesn't want to hear about childhood games, Lu," but looks pale. Edmund looks at her sharply and changes the subject. Peter says, "Susan's right, Lucy," and Will, turning to Lucy, says, gaze suddenly dreamy, "Where?"

Peter thinks, How does he know it's a where?

-

He can take these risks, Will reminds himself. And they already know about Narnia. He didn't tell them anything, and there is always more going on than he is aware of in the world of the Old Ones. England isn't the only center of the world, and Arthur isn't her only legend. So when he asks them about Narnia he only says he knows someone who's been there. This is only somewhat true. He has been there, in a way, in the Book of Gramarye. And Lucy is so eager to share. All she says is like a fairy tale, a vivid bedtime story, for she knows how to be careful, how to obscure her own role in these things. She has been practicing how to share Narnia in half-truths, and Will envies and respects this.

In the company of Pevensie and his younger siblings, never has he felt this out of the loop on the bigger goings-on. He hasn't felt this short since Bran started setting his shoulders and talking like the Pendragon.

After long enough he tells her, because he can take these risks, because in the end if her face twists in horror he can always lift his hand and spread his fingers, and she will be at peace again. Years of loneliness give him the desperation to even consider this. He knows that the memory is a tricky, tenacious thing; it wraps around everything and digests it, tearing things to bits, dissolving, building compounds, swallowing bits and pieces under the surface. There are some things that the body doesn't forget, and he knows them: a regal gaze, a kingly stance, a pride not found in shepherding or difference but something more, something bigger.

Sometimes he looks at Peter and sees a king, another king.

Sometimes he would give anything for Bran to come back.

So here where he can take the risk, where he won't have to live with the daily memory of erasing someone's memory, after long enough he tells her. Will does not say so much as admit, "I am an Old One." To this, Lucy only takes his hand and smiles and says, "I was old once, too."

-

Bran meets Peter at the student union building, looking for Will he says but he doesn't seem like he's in much of a hurry. They sit and have a few drinks and Peter (who has more alcohol in him than Bran) asks where Bran's King Arthur sword is, and Bran says "What?" and Peter says, I left mine there, left it all (waving his hand to indicate distance), and Bran looks at him with his strange owl-eyes and says, nodding, "Yeah. Yeah, me too."

-

"Do you ever feel like," Peter says, "like this isn't the way life should be? Did you ever have something, a bright moment, just to have it..." His fingers close on thin air and then snap. "And then you find yourself here buried in textbooks just wondering what happened, and if you'd even be miserable if you hadn't had that shining, shining moment?"

Will looks at him and breathes heavily, fingers twitching involuntarily. "Do you wish you didn't remember?"

Peter looks away from the wall and meets his gaze. "I... I don't know." There is fear, there, and the look of someone who knows he is trapped but has stopped desperately rattling the bars of his cage. Once, it occurs to him, this man knew he was King.

"Me neither."