All Over Before
Peter's voice is shaking when he answers the phone and he realizes something is very, very wrong when he says Hello.
"It's me," he breathes, and he thinks for a minute he must be dreaming.
"Where are you?" he asks immediately, planning the dramatic rescue, the reunion—everything he's planned for the last ten years, the last lifetime. If he's honest, he's been planning forever.
"I'm at the train station," Peter's voice crackles over the phone. "I'm okay, Ed."
Relief floods through Edmund like medication, warming his stomach.
But before Edmund can say "I'll come get you" or "Here's Mum and Dad" or "I love you, Peter, and I always have", Peter ruins everything—just like always.
"Where's Susan?" Peter asks plaintively, and Edmund realizes that nothing will ever go the way he planned.
And though he wants to hate his sister when he gives her the phone, he can't.
"Hello?" and he can hear the love from the other end of the phone, where Peter stands in the dirty train station in the dark. "Of course. Of course." Muffled voices and Edmund waits for it to come—it always comes, looming and awful, like he's being hit by a car or a bullet or something else hard and permanent.
It comes, of course.
"I love you," and it punches Edmund in the gut like a lead fist.
When Susan gets her keys, he wants to vomit up everything he's ever felt. But when she says "Come with me, Ed", he agrees—he always agrees—and he'll go and watch and see them kiss, see them whisper, and he'll hate them both but more than that he'll hate himself.
He gets into his coat and he feels cold, but it's not really cold—just the usual disappointment, and he chokes it back with the temporary joy he knows will come when Peter hugs him—because no matter how brief, in that second, Peter is his and Edmund can forget that Susan exists at all.
And it is enough, just to have that. Someday he'll know.
But for now, Edmund sits next to Susan in the car, and he smiles thinking how someday, somehow, the waiting will have to pay off.