Loose Ends

by chinacabinet

1945 England: The Pevensies are together again now the war is finally over. Lucy and Edmund tell stories of their adventures in Narnia on the dawn treader, but find the missing is almost too much to bear for all of them, even Peter. When a terrible train wreck scatters them to various reaches of Narnia, they search for each other and for what each of them left behind. Lucian/Family

21. Chapter 20

And then the world was set on pause. Not all of them, just the one. But it was stopped, if only for a minute.

Caspian was kissing her. He was Caspian and he was kissing her. Lucy rather supposed, then, that she ought to kiss him back.

She had been kissed before: a peck on the lips from a plain boy at a plain party in a plain house. But Caspian was not a plain boy; his fantastically ebony eyelashes brushed her face, as his high cheekbones did the same to hers. And this was not a plain party nor a plain house; this was a stolen night and a moon trapping pond and a dance floor made of dirt and grass. And so it was to be expected that this kiss would not be the same plain one Lucy had received in a world that was not stopped. And it wasn't. Which was to say, it was better.

Caspian broke the kiss at the start of another, and he reached out to touch her for the first time. He only tapped his fingers to the curve of her waist, and perhaps he had not done so before for fear that she was not real. Lucy then decided that if Caspian was free to crumble beneath the weight of things he wanted to do, she could not be expected to refrain. So she touched him too, running her fingertips past hard jaw lines and through coarse, dark hair. But she let her hands fall, because having his lips and his face was entirely too much for her.

And that was the moment that panic ensued.

For if one kiss was too much, then surely he must be as well. Voices broke the silver silence, though Lucy was the only one that could hear them. They said terribly true things:

He is too old, he is too handsome. He is too much of a king.

And should the mirror have surfaced right then and there, Lucy would not have been shocked; for the demons within were not under glass but inside of her head. They taunted and whispered and tugged on her thoughts; ruining them. She looked at the pool very suddenly, with a moon swallowed in darkness at the very bottom, struggling to get free.

She was scared. And she ran.

A/N: I am so incredibly sorry about how long it has been for an update, and what a short update at that. Don't worry, I have not abandoned the story, I've just been very busy lately. But my time is beginning to free up again, so a nice long update is coming your way. Thank you so much for all the reviews and favorites, they mean a lot. :)