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CHAPTER TWO
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"You know that place between sleep and awake,
that place where you can still remember dreaming?
There's where I'll always love you.
That's where I'll be waiting."
– James V. Hart, Hook –
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— England —
He stepped back into a world, and didn't know its shape. Didn't know his shape in it. He had lost his stride, and the rhythm of the music. He stepped out of tune, and no one cared to help him back to the beat.
Peter Pevensie stared at the children striding by him, and clutched the object in his hand tighter, feeling the delicate gold chain work an imprint into the skin of his palm. They couldn't understand, these people. They looked at him and around him and through him. None of it made sense and he wondered if ever he'd be able to breathe— Breathe, yes; he wanted to run until he stood panting at the end. Under blue skies and yellow sun. Warm grass beneath his bare feet.
But there was only concrete, and they were underground, and there was no sun or grass or sky. There was only metal and noise and steam-smoke.
The train came in.
Edmund gathered their wits and their belongings, shoved him forward until he gained focus.
Peter grabbed his coat, roughly attempted to straighten his blazer as they jumped into the train car. Lucy found them seats in a cabin together. They shared glances as Edmund rammed the door home and they were alone. Suddenly, they all laughed.
It was freedom, the setting loose of tethered, feral emotions. Underneath lay the heavy current. Wanting to snap, wanting to crack, wanting to snarl. But they pinned it down and laughed instead of lashing out.
As one they averted awkward gazes and found seats. Lucy curled her fingers around his other hand, not the one holding the remnant of a forgotten day, and squeezed kindly. Peter looked over at her. He hoped his eyes were grateful. Prayed for them to be so. Edmund's expression caught his, and they shared a long stare. Then the train lunged out of the underground and into daylight, and the landscape flashed by the windows. Peter used it as a distraction.
Lucy pulled a book out of her bag and settled in, content. Edmund pretended to read the newspaper he'd found under the seat, but watched Peter from behind it. They were the same, but everything was different now. Edmund felt it in the air and it set his spine stiff. He had no idea what was coming, but he could imagine. It felt like a new battleground. One Susan had weathered more than he had ever dared. Foreign waters. Sinking sands. Broken spears and torn banners lay strewn at his feet, and Edmund wondered what the future held for them. In this new world, where everything looked the same and there were no maps.
It would come, in time. For now they were together, and the train bore them onward to school and that special sort of hell it held. Edmund flicked the pages of the paper, forcing them upright as he turned one to read the other side. His gaze strayed to Peter, who was hunched over himself and pressed against the window, peering down into his curled fingers at something he held like it were valued treasure. He'd know what it was soon enough, and Edmund wished the moment would never come. But it would. It would because it had to.
Edmund felt his own heart clench as a wave of temporary bitterness and jealousy rose. But he beat it back and sealed it off in the darkness. He didn't need such things. Grudges were long since burnt to the ground and pounded into ash.
As if it were the last time.
Until the next life.
Scanning a report on Hitler's army in its latest battle, Edmund hummed to himself and raised his brow. Military strategies were a special favorite. Let's see if he could predict the outcome of this battle before it happened; perhaps he could impress Milton Meeps – one of the boys at school who treated the Pevensie brothers like lesser gods; the thought made Edmund scoff affectionately and sadly – with his 'genius'.
ӜӜӜӜӜ
The wind echoed like memory.
It washed over him, a steady touch—he closed his eyes to it.
Even from such a distance, he fancied he could hear the ocean.
CRASH! dashed the breakers up onto the rocks.
BOOM! Thundered the surf as it exploded in a thousand salty droplets on the sand.
He winced against the sound, even in distant memory. Something of them. . . something unpleasant. . . he should remember. . .
". . . Peter. . . Peter. . . Peter. . . !"
Laughter, a voice. He knew that voice.
His heart rebounded toward it, euphoric, and something told him he should know it. Something. . . something. . .
"Oh, Peter! Peter, come!"
He opened his eyes.
Blue sky filled his vision. He spun, looking for the source of the voice, and the dusky deep green shadows of trees blurred around him.
Dancing, through a thousand dryads on a summer's night. Laughter roared and fire purred. Mead frothed over every bowl and beveled goblet. Stars flecked the velvet black of heaven shining clear amongst fire-spark impostors rising on a current of evening breeze.
"Peter! Darling. . . Peter! Come here, dear love."
The voice beckoned again, and he felt lost amidst the frenzy—something menacing in the innocence of it all.
He put his hands to his head to block out another round of raucous laughter—
Cair Paravel.
Home.
He could see it in the distance from the rise of earth he stood on.
Beyond it, the sun rose out of the glistening sea, turning it gold and rosy with its yellow light. White spires topped in silver ornament, with draping luxuriant pennants of red-and-saffron. Castle walls gleaming in the morning light. From here he could see the garden Susan ordered newly-built. Clouds hovered, turning the scene into a pretty view of paradise.
"Peter, oh, Peter!"
He spun around to face the voice.
But the wind rushed up to kiss his cheek and stroke his hair.
"Peter. . . Peter. . . My darling. . . come back now."
Love and joy, always, only.
"I can't. Find. You!"
Frustration born of desperate dismay and horrible confusion tore the words from his chest. He sprang forward a dozen strides. The long-grass buffeted against him, like hungry fingers trying to pull him down.
"I don't know where you are! I've tried everything! Come to me! Come find me! Come find. . . me. . ." He pressed his face to his hands, shoulders hunched inward. The sob broke from him, seeping out around fractured edges. He stumbled forward three steps more and fell to his knees amongst the long-grass and wildflowers.
"Oh, Peter. . . come home, dear love. Come back."
"I can't!" He lifted his head and screamed it to the sky, the earth, this universe – Narnia – this land that should have been his home but seemed only to be a hell of beauty. A perfect image he could not touch.
"Oh, Peter. . ."
"Leave me alone!"
Thunder snarled in the distance.
Peter woke with a low gasp, panting. His fingers curled tightly into the sheets, so tight it hurt when he let them go.
A nightmare.
That was all it had been. . . a nightmare. Shakily, he brought one hand to his face, pressing his palm against his mouth. Thunder growled again, filtering in from the open window at the far end of the room. The thin cream-colored drapes fluttered in a fitful gust of storm-brought wind; the weft and weave of them dimly illuminated by the yellow of the street lamp across the road.
Peter breathed in slow. It left him on an unsteady rasp, and he jerked, eyes sweeping the room.
Be asleep, be asleep, his heartbeat chanted, as he searched out Edmund's bed in the darkness. But the shadows cast by the street lamp made it hard to determine anything from this angle. Nothing shifted or stirred.
Good, then.
His breathing began to grow easier, comforted that Edmund hadn't been disturbed.
"You had that dream again, didn't you?"
Peter jerked, bed-sheets tumbling down as he sat up even straighter, eyes straining in the dark. "Did I wake you?" his voice asked instead.
Avoiding, his mind chanted—Being kind, his heart coaxed.
Edmund made a noise, and in the dark Peter didn't know what it meant. Then a shuffling sound came, and the older boy could make out the younger boy's shadow as he rose from his bed to come to Peter's. Edmund sat on the edge of the mattress; it dipped beneath his weight. His dark hair was an ink stain against the night, and unruly from sleep. Ed combed a hand through it, forcing the locks into more weird angles and curls—Peter smiled at the sight, but too easily the expression faded in the face of his pain.
"Did you have that one again. . . You know," Edmund looked at him, and now Peter could just see his eyes in the dark, "with Amalia?"
Fire seared through his soul at the name, and he reached up unconsciously to clutch his shirt above his heart. His eyes met Ed's, and he tried to avert them—but lying wouldn't do, and he'd never survive it. He nodded instead, weakly; submitting to defeat and dismay.
"Yes."
His voice sounded small, and broken, and he hated how this was all that was left to him now. Pathetic weeping in the night; lonely, awful dreams beckoning him to remember forever what was, what had been forsaken – without his choice, he earnestly plead for that to be counted in the crime built against him! – what he could never hope to return to in any life on any world. No matter how much he ached that he might.
"I'm. . . sorry, that I. . . woke you." He glanced at his brother, sitting like a thoughtful judge at the end of his bed. Edmund looked up from peering into the shadows as if they held his wisdom. He nodded, kindly; noncommittally.
"It's all right."
But it wasn't; it was cruel, and thoughtless. Peter felt torn in half; for consideration of his brother's well-being, and to be lost to memory. This was no place for bad dreams; but they haunted him everywhere, at each turn, and every time they greeted him was less opportune than the last. He felt too tired to think about it any more. Swallowing down the half-caught sob that came with stirring all these forbidden remembrances, Peter lay back down. "I think. . . we should both try to sleep again."
"Yeah," Edmund whispered, nodding. He rose from Peter's bed, but drifted toward the open window when the thunder howled once more.
Edmund reached for the catch, but paused, catching sight of a figure on the street below. An old man, hunched over, with a brown cap on his head. He carried an umbrella in one hand and a covered basket over his left arm— It reminded Edmund of the picnic basket Mum brought with them on holiday. When they'd gone fishing and boating with Dad and the war had been ages off. When they'd been children; not this odd amalgam of child and grown up they'd become now.
The old man stopped under the lamp, looking out. The wind swept through again, moaning gently down the street. A newspaper flew balled up and torn before it. The road was empty, the houses and shops dark. The old man looked up, and Edmund wondered if their eyes met or if the old man even saw him— a boy standing at an open window in his pyjamas, awake when it was too late for boys in dorms to be about. Or was the old man looking at the clouds? Testing the weather, to gauge how long he would have left before the rain broke?
He'd never know; it would exist forever as one of those tiny mysteries. Edmund smiled, dipping his chin.
The old man in the street below lifted his umbrella to touch the brim on his cap, and nodded. Then, without aplomb, he opened the umbrella and hurried off across the road; swallowed by the nighttime shadows.
A fat drop of rain landed beside Edmund's finger on the windowsill. Moving his thumb, Edmund covered the drop—feeling the cool damp of the rain against his skin. He stared out, the wind ruffling against his hair and smelling now of electricity and storm, looking across the rooftops and ridgepoles and spires. Tonight was only the beginning of what would come, he thought, drawing down the window and locking it as the rain began to fall steadily.
Turning, Edmund surveyed the small room. His eyes honed in on Peter, lying on his side, asleep again. From his hand dangled a chain that just barely caught the light. Cautious, Edmund crept to his brother's bedside.
Glancing at Peter's face, Edmund lifted the object up. The chain twisted round and round in his fingers, and the heavy pendant swung back and forth in a shallow arc.
He knew what it was, and a feeling caught in his chest, but he swallowed it down. Curling the chain back around the locket, Edmund set the trinket into his brother's hand, closing his fingers over it. They all had their pains, their tiny agonies—Lucy, perhaps less than they. But they'd survive. Aslan had purpose, he still held firm; there was reason in all the great lion did. Even if it made little sense in the moment.
But the hardship would be in understanding. The struggle in learning how. Edmund went back to the window. Resting his head against the cool glass, watching the rain ripple down it, he sighed.
"Oh, Aslan. . . how long this year is looking out to be."
A/N:
In my original work, I'd always combined this scene with the first chapter; but rewriting it I couldn't bring myself to do that, since I felt the tones were off. One should end on a (even if bittersweet) relatively positive note. This scene (two scenes, really) is more sober and weighted. It threw off the first chapter, so I made it it's own chapter. I think I might do that from now on; divide Narnian chapters from the English ones. I hope you enjoy this; please drop a review, they feed my soul! ;)
~ Windy