Disclaimer: This is fanfiction. Therefore we must assume I do not own said concepts.

Scars

Second part of my MP series. This one's from Edmund's point of view.

The scars are what bother him the most.

They snake from his brother's hips to his shoulder blades, then lap over to the tops of his shoulders, where they end in ugly red commas.

They pain Peter, who sleeps on his stomach with a hot towel laid over them. When the towel cools and he begins to moan, Edmund goes and replaces it, or his father does. Peter always responds the same way, a bleary smile, a whispered thanks. He doesn't speak much anymore. He rarely smiles. Edmund has yet to see him laugh.

Peter had seemed fine when he'd arrived to pick him up from the train station. A little pale perhaps, but nothing truly amiss. But once Peter had been home, he'd all but dropped on the front rug. Father hadn't seemed surprised, not by his son's exhaustion, not by the scars on his back, not by his silence or his whimpers at night. Edmund had been, but he'd done his best to keep that to himself, and spent as much time as he could with Peter.

He slept a lot. He loved the sun now, seemed to edge across the bed to stay in the light from the window. They kept the fire up in his room and the warmth seemed to be coming back to him, his hands weren't so cold now.

When Edmund comes into the room Peter looks up and smiles, a small one, but one nonetheless, "Ed."
He comes and sits down by the bed, "How are you feeling?"
"I'm fine, Ed. Don't worry so much."
HE couldn't help it though. It was his brother lying in bed when he should be walking home with the other mates on the rugby team. It was his brother who couldn't sleep at night, when he should have nothing but happy dreams. It was his brother…

"Ed. Eddy?"
He snapped his head up and Peter laughed, "You building castles in Narnia again?"
"Maybe. Should I have a buttress or a tower, high king?"
Peter laughed again, quietly. It was good to hear his brother laugh. It had been a long time.

Edmund saw his empty bowl of breakfast and asked, "You hungry?" and was pleasantly surprised when his brother nodded. "I'll get you something then. Be back in a moment."
"I'm not going anywhere."
That made Edmund feel better than he had in weeks.

He knows the sound now, knows to wake right when it first starts, so that he can grab his brother and hold him tight, so that he can tell him, "It's all right Pete. I'm still here."
Peter will smile then, a little sheepishly, tell him sorry, and he'll say not to worry about it, that it doesn't matter. But it does, because his brother should be able to get a decent night's sleep for once in his life, but he probably never would again. He deserved –

Well, he deserved a lot more than this.