Disclaimer: this fic is 'FOR NARNIA! AND FOR ASLAN!'... just don't go thinking that i actually own narnia and aslan...

*is doing the electric slide just because i just flipping feel like it!*

okay, well, first of all, i'd just like to thank all of you people for the all of the reviews, and alerts, and *grins very happily* even favorites! they makes justplaincrazy very happy... very happy indeed! oh and look at the result! an update in 2 days! yay! so, thank you for the support and i do hope it continues...

wow... i have nothing to else say except... edmund chapter! whooopeeee! oh and of course, R&R please!


Edmund and Lucy watched Kacey mumbling apologies to Caleb, very amused. Perhaps the only thing funnier than the expression on Kacey's face now was her display of what could barely be called 'dancing' earlier that night.

"Oh, poor Caleb..." Lucy said, failing to stifle a giggle.

"Oh, poor Caleb's toes, you mean."

"Yes, his poor toes... Kacey is a rather dreadful dancer, isn't she?"

"Very," Edmund said, grinning.

"But I should say- they are an awfully cute pair, aren't they?" Lucy sighed. She was such a hopeless romantic- like all of the other girls in the world...

"What?" Edmund said suddenly, frowning at her.

Lucy snapped out of her romantic daze. "What? Oh, it's just that I think they would look rather cute together..."

"Right..." Edmund replied frowning at the pair. It was almost definitely his imagination, but something about what Lucy had said gave him this odd twinge... No matter, though! Lucy thought that almost everyone would make a cute couple, even if Phillip the horse decided to propose to a marshwiggle.

"Oh, hold on... Watch this..." Lucy said staring at Kacey and Caleb with determination. "Kacey is going to continue saying sorry... And Caleb will to try to be a 'man' about it, and say that he's completely and totally fine, though he's probably in excruciating pain right about now... Kacey will offer to get him some ice, and he'll refuse, again, because of pride, of course, and he'll try to go get the ice himself... There he goes limping off, and oh! That looked rather painful..."

Edmund watched in slight awe as everything that Lucy had narrated came to reality and grimaced as Caleb faceplanted into a pot of flowers. Kacey, however, did not notice this for she was headed in a completely different direction.

"Lu, I'm not even going to ask how you knew that..." Edmund said.

"All part of the art of being a girl, Edmund..."

"Right. I don't-"

"LUCY! Is that you, darling?" came a squeal of delight from their immediate left. There was a whirl of fabric and hair, nearly sending Edmund toppling over yet another pile of flowers.

"MARGARET!!!" Lucy's equally high-pitched squeal (in truth, it might have been a tad higher...) rung in Edmund's ears as he watched the rather conspicuous reunion of Lucy and her best friend.

Without even a glance backward at Edmund, they both went off, babbling incessantly in a dialect no one else could fully understand. Edmund merely shook his head and chuckled. He had once before tried to understand the behaviors of girls... Only once, and then, he vowed to himself never to do anything so stupidly complex ever again...

As he scanned the crowd for Peter and Susan, wondering where they had gone off to, he spotted a familiar head disappearing through the doors into the balcony outside. Though he had no idea why, he had this tugging feeling, wanting him to go follow. His brain in slight protest, his unresponsive feet shuffled off to the balcony, for no conscious reason at all.

The night outside was cool and calm- rather typical Narnian weather, and as Edmund's eyes searched the balcony, he found that he was in total solitude. There was no sign of anybody else outside, as it was rather livelier and more exciting in the ballroom.

Well, that's odd... He was sure he'd seen Kacey exit out through these precise doors... As he pondered this mysterious plight, the door suddenly opened and closed again, letting out the loud and boisterous voices and music from the ballroom for a fraction of a second.

"Edmund! There you are!" Peter said, sounding slightly on edge, though Edmund wrote this off as a result from the rather amusing cat-and-mouse game Peter was playing with Lady Rosalie.

"Yeah?" Edmund said, a little distracted for he was still wondering where Kacey had disappeared to.

"Oreius has just told me some rather... urgent news..."

"About?"

Peter hesitated, looking around the balcony as if to assure himself that there was no one else present. There wasn't.

"There's been a... disturbance... in the forest."

"What exactly does that entitle, Pete? You're being awfully vague here," Edmund said, somewhat frustrated.

"All right! All right! It seems that a couple of fauns have been attacked in the Shuddering Woods..."

"Are they alright?"

"Yes, yes... They're fine- recovering," Peter said, sounding stressed, "But the trouble is... they don't seem to remember what exactly had done it."

"Well, it'll be some of her old followers, wouldn't it?"

Peter sighed. "Yes, I suppose so, but I thought we'd driven out the last of them months ago..."

"There's bound to be a few that have avoided detection until now, right?" Edmund said logically, though he was not entirely convinced of the answer himself. There was a short silence as Peter pondered this.

"Yes... You're probably right... But I'm still going to look into it... Something about it doesn't seem right..."

"Are you going to tell Susan and Lucy?"

"No... I don't want them to worry too much over something that is, as you said, probably going to surface as a minor issue."

"Right. But you know it's your head on the chopping block if either of the girls find out you've been keeping something from them?"

"Of course. But I'll just tell them that you put me up to it," Peter said jokingly before quickly turning around and exiting, slamming the door shut behind him.

"Do that, and your head will be on more than one chopping block!" Edmund called after him, laughing.

Turning back around, he nearly lost his balance as he had involuntarily jumped back in surprise. A slightly disheveled-looking Kacey had magically materialized out of nowhere and was now making her way up the marble steps to the balcony.

"Bloody hell, Kacey!" Edmund exclaimed, "You really shouldn't sneak up on people like that..."

"Sorry! I'm not very good at sneaking up on people... So, I guess when I'm actually succeeding at it, I really don't notice," she said giving him a quick grin before taking an uncommonly large interest on the swirling wave pattern on the railings.

"It's fine... Forgive me, but what in Aslan's name have you been up to?" Edmund asked, staring at the large collection of leaves in her hair and the thoroughly-dirtied hem of her dress.

Kacey flushed slightly. "Oh... I-uh... I went for a walk around the garden... for some fresh air. And I... I dropped this... um, bracelet that Dani made me... in the bushes."

"Oh. Did you find it?"

"Huh? Oh, no."

"Do you want any help to look for it?"

"Oh, no. It's fine. Dani can make me a new one..." Kacey said with a smirk. "After she chews me out for losing the other one."

"Right," Edmund said, grinning. Then, not fully realizing what he was doing, he said, "Well, you have leaves all over your hair. Here-"

His hand, acting out of its own accord like his feet, reached over to pick the leaves off. But Kacey turned a very deep shade of crimson and swiveled around in a rather inconspicuous manner to stare at a clump of highly uninteresting trees. The action would have looked fairly innocent and completely accidental to any bystander- and Edmund was not entirely sure it had been done deliberately either, though he felt the undeniable urge to hit his hand repeatedly against the wall to punish it for its involuntarily foolish move.

"So... Great ball, huh?" Kacey grinned, changing the subject. She shook her head slightly, loosening the leaves and watched them fall to the ground.

"Yeah. I saw you, um... dancing," Edmund snickered, "... before... with Caleb." On those final two words, Edmund couldn't seem to suppress a slight edge in his voice. What the bloody hell was wrong with him tonight?

Fortunately, Kacey was a bit too busy turning into a shade of red that was oh so violently resemblant of the color of a nice ripe tomato. "Oh, God... Please don't remind me," she groaned, shaking her head.

"It wasn't all bad, really..." Edmund said, grinning mischievously, "At least you had good aim. You managed not to step on anyone else's toes but Caleb's!"

"Oh, very funny," Kacey replied, glaring at him, "Well, at least I wasn't wearing heels, right?"

"Of course." Edmund smirked at Kacey's sneakers. "Nice shoes, by the way."

"Hey! You are not allowed to make fun of Glinda and Elphaba!"

"You named them?" Edmund asked, heartily amused.

"Yup. They have two completely different personalities." Edmund noted that Kacey was still trying extremely hard to stare anywhere else but him (at the moment, she was concentrating awfully hard on a lady bug that was crawling across the floor).

"Do you name all of your shoes?"

"Of course not!" Kacey said this rather matter-of-factly. "It would be too hard to keep track of them. I'm a girl-"

"Clearly," Edmund interrupted, smirking.

Though she turned brilliantly red, she continued without pause, "-we have truckloads of shoes. Nope! These shoes get names because they're my favorite."

"Right. So, I'm not allowed to make fun of Kacey's shoes- got it," he said, still smirking. It was then that he spotted the odd little trinket dangling from Kacey's neck. "Am I allowed to make fun of your necklace?"

"No you are not," Kacey said defensively, fingering the necklace, "It's a lucky charm!"

Edmund laughed. He was beginning to realize that it was vastly entertaining to tease her. "Well, it looks like a tab you would find on top of a soda can, tied to a piece of string, if you ask me."

"So what if it is?" Kacey huffed.

"Well then, that's just a little odd."

Kacey gave him a reproachful glare before staring over the top of his head at the glowing, crescent-shaped Narnian moon.

"I'm just teasing, Kacey," Edmund chuckled with as much charm as he could muster (quite a large amount, he thought, not to sound narcissistic).

"Right," Kacey said stiffly, shamelessly avoiding looking at him, though she was rather pink in the face. "I better go look for Dani now..."

"Be my guest."

And Kacey swiftly turned around and headed for the double doors.

"Good night, Miss Brinkley," Edmund called after her.

She abruptly stopped, turning around to face him. She had this odd look on her face, as if she was trying very hard not to laugh. Then, she told him with a very serious face, "Good night, Mr-" She stopped herself. "Well, I don't know your last name yet, but I will find out." It seemed that she could not contain herself any more, though, for she burst out into laughter shortly after.

Edmund laughed. "It's Pevensie."

"Right," she said with a blatantly fake stony expression on her face.

"Good night, then, Mr. Pevensie," she said pointedly, before turning around and marching into the ballroom with a rather rebellious air about her.


ta da! *wipes forehead* goodness, that was a tough chapter to write... it was like 90% dialogue! but it was super fun, too! *snickers at her own joke... "clearly"* oh and yes, yes, i know what you're going to say... 'if kacey is a supposed narnia addict, why doesn't she know edmund's last name?' well... my answer to that it of course she knows his last name, but she also knows it would sound a bit stalker-ish if she knew his last name already, seeing as the pevensies didn't go by their last names in narnia, but just their titles.

anyways! hmmmm.... don't you just LOVE authors that update in record time? two days! oh! oh! i know what you should do! you should be totally awesome and nice and reward said author, who undoubtedly worked extremely hard, and REVIEW! yes, yes... a very wise thing to do, i should say...

-justplaincrazy8