A/N: This menace of a story continues to grow on me... sooo we might be in Part 3 until Chapter 63, because Caspian refuses to let me breeze over VotDT canon as much as I thought I could. So if you're impatient for a Caslina reunion, please take it up with Caspian because he's given me no peace this last week or two ðŸ˜
Chapter 60 Content Warnings: brief non-OTP relationship, brief mention of slavery (Lone Islands), respiratory illness, minor character death
Chapter 60: mine to lose
Caspian
When the Lone Islands are less than a week away, Drinian spots three children adrift in the sea. Caspian dives in to help, and he surfaces to the face of Queen Lucy. With her are King Edmund and their petulant cousin, a pale, freckled boy named Eustace who insults Reepicheep and outright faints at the sight of Tavros, but Caspian's head is whirling with too many possibilities to pay close attention.
Queen Lucy and King Edmund have returned. They left through the twisted oak at Aslan's command, they have come back in Caspian's own lifetime, and they've only aged a year in Narnia's three.
Hope finds a crack in the stone castle Caspian has built around his heart. It slithers out like ivy and curls in his lungs, shortening his breath and rattling between his ribs, treacherous weed that it is. It whispers to him sweetly, intoxicating and poisonous.
Maybe she'll come back as Lucy and Edmund have, maybe she's already here, maybe he'll find her in the waves further east -
Caspian takes his hope by the neck and shoves it down, forces it into his gut where it twists and cramps and torments.
It's been three years. It's been over, finished, done with for twice as long as he knew her.
Yet that night, Caspian lies awake in his hammock staring at the hold's wooden beams, helplessly trying to stamp down the temptation of wanting what he will never have again. He forms his memories into a ghost of the twisted oak that took her and saws it in two, sends it careening off the cliff's edge into a grave of mist and fog. He imagines his hope as a glass sculpture of her and smashes it on the severed stump left behind.
Caspian takes the twisting vine of what if in his hands and strangles the life from it, clenching fists until his knuckles ache.
He will not hope. He cannot hope.
Not about her.
Like any weed, hope is stubborn. For every attempt to crush it, Caspian finds himself distracted twice over. He spends hours peering across the waves, inquiring of the lookouts. Caspian tells himself and others he's wary of more pirates, but he tastes longing's cloying syrup in his throat.
Caspian tries not to ask about London, but he does. He tries not to chase Queen Lucy's tales of England like a dog begging for scraps - for all King Edmund's virtues, his sister is the livelier storyteller - but he does.
To Lucy and Edmund, he insists his questions are academic. Pure curiosity, an explorer's spirit itching for new shores.
In less than three days, they call his bluff.
It happens at sunset, that cusp of duty and freedom, a neat bifurcation blurred here on the sea. A ship never truly sleeps.
"How are you, Caspian?" Lucy asks, peering at the horizon with unconvincing nonchalance.
Caspian leans on the railing and speaks to the sky's brilliant marble of blood-red and umber-orange. "Narnia is well. Pirates may pose trouble, but -"
Edmund appears at his right, sipping water after a spirited duel with Tavros.
"Not Narnia. How are you?"
Caspian squeezes the polished wood, worn rough by the sun and sea spray. It's been some time since anyone asked him that, and longer still since he thought of an answer.
If his kingdom is well, then he ought to be well.
"Why do you ask?" Caspian says - a deflection, but the best answer he has.
Lucy and Edmund trade a glance behind his back. It's Lucy who speaks next.
"I couldn't help but…"
Lucy looks up at him, and Caspian keeps his gaze where the waves meet the horizon.
Lucy continues. "I couldn't help but notice Addie isn't here."
He prayed she wouldn't say it.
"No," Caspian says, flat as he can manage. "She left the same day you did. For Spare- for London."
Edmund's dark eyebrows jump. "London, England?"
Caspian thinks of the tree tumbling off the cliff, and he remembers the weight of the axe in his grip, and has it not been long enough to speak of this without his stomach twisting in knots?
"Yes," Caspian answers simply.
Edmund hums and glances to his sister again, but she seems unaffected.
"I wondered," Lucy says.
She did? He didn't.
"What do you mean?"
Lucy extends her hand. "Shake it."
An odd request, but Caspian wiggles her hand from side to side. Lucy corrects him to an up-and-down motion.
"It's part of saying 'nice to meet you' in England. Mr Tumnus didn't know either, but Addie did."
"When was this?"
Lucy hesitates. "At the Stone Table. Bit of a muddled introduction, unfortunately."
Another recollection best left alone. Caspian only recalls that skirmish in nightmares; it was a haze of blood, betrayal, and barely averted loss.
"I see." Caspian inhales the sea air and wills the salt to draw out the poison of recollections.
Lucy and Edmund fall quiet, their faces turned into the wind as the Dawn Treader cuts through the water, waves breaking on her bow in sprays of white.
He ought to pretend the conversation never happened. He needs to forget.
Caspian's mouth betrays him.
"I don't suppose… this past year, while you were in England, did you ever…"
Lucy touches his arm in either comfort or pity - Caspian can't discern which, and if he looks anywhere but the endless sea, there will be no hiding his years-old grief, bitter and brimming with ill-fated longing.
"I'm afraid we weren't looking for her," Lucy says. "But even if we were…"
"London's a big city," Edmund continues. "And not all the evacuees are back."
"Evacuees?"
Edmund hastens through an explanation: England is presently embroiled in a large-scale war with dozens of other countries, and two years ago bombs flattened large areas of London - England's capital and Addie's home.
"It's a metal shell that explodes into fire," Edmund explains. "A bit like a flaming catapult shot."
Caspian grips the railing, knuckles white as he recalls Addie's nightmares of raining fire. Why in His own name would Aslan have sent her back to a war zone where she could be killed? Lion's teeth, what if she's -
"Easy there," says Edmund, patting his back. "She's likely in the countryside. Still might be, but in any case, the bombs have mostly stopped."
He never should have let her go. If he'd been a second quicker…
Caspian loosens his grip and forces his shoulders straight.
There is nothing he can do now but watch the fruit of his hopes wither on the vine.
"I'm sure you're right," he says. "We should reach the Lone Islands by tomorrow."
Caspian abandons wave-watching in favour of a spar with Tavros' brother and pretends not to notice Lucy and Edmund's worried glances following him.
Addie
Mum likes him. She says Ted softens the hard edges she's grown since childhood, that he makes her gentler and reminds her how to smile.
Ridiculous; she smiles plenty when there's something to smile about.
Less lately, with bills piling up and Mum's extra shifts and two more blood-stained handkerchiefs Addie found in the laundry last week.
Mum said it's nothing, that all the factory workers cough a little blood sometimes, nothing to worry about. A common condition, inevitable, a byproduct of working the textile machines all day.
Addie knows better.
Trouble is, Mum won't listen.
Mum says she's been to the doctor, says her herbal tea helps, says stop worrying, Adelaine, but…
But Mum also said Ted is the kind of man she pictured, and I won't always be around.
Addie tilts her face into the April drizzle. She makes enough keeping city records to pay for doctor's house visits. If Mum had seen a doctor, she'd have medication to show for it. But she doesn't, so she hasn't.
"Darling, you'll catch a cold."
Ted emerges from the kitchen door behind her, his arm warm at her waist. Addie shrugs, blinking away the rain dripping past her eyebrows.
"You say that every time," she reminds him with a smile. "I haven't yet."
Ted wraps her in his coat and rubs her shoulders. "One day you will, and you'll be a terrible patient. Why not watch the rain from inside?"
Addie rests her head on Ted's shoulder on reflex. "It's soothing. Washes off the city's grime, I suppose."
Ted nods toward the factory stacks belching smoke in the distance. During the war they were ordnance factories, and before the Blitz, Mum came home with gunpowder packed under her nails. Now the factory where Mum works makes textiles, but it still spews stinking smoke from the coal furnaces.
"I doubt the rain helps much," says Ted. "It falls from the same sky as that smoke."
Addie considers the brown rainwater pooling under her boots. Ted's probably right.
She lets Ted usher her inside to the kitchen, where the stove's warmth chases away the chill. Addie lingers by the back door, nestled in Ted's coat. It smells of cigar smoke and lantern oil - pleasant only in its familiarity.
Addie leans into his hand on her back - chaste and gentle, as he always is. Ted's reserve has its charm, but sometimes she wants to be held so tightly her ribs ache.
"If you're tired of the city," Ted says, "let's go on holiday. Just for a day or two, to clear your head. The country air might do you good."
Addie thinks of Mrs Shaw and the bimonthly letters they still exchange. She's never gone back, but it might be nice to see the Shaws again. Josie could come too, get away from university for a weekend.
Upstairs, Mum's cough rattles.
"I can't," Addie murmurs. "Mum needs me here."
Ted nods like he expected as much and rubs circles into her shoulder blades. Addie flinches when his palm lands too heavy on her right shoulder. Sometimes it gets a phantom ache, especially on cold or rainy days.
"Alright," Ted says. "When she feels better."
Addie nods absently. Ted's presence fades, his footsteps retreating over the creaking wooden floor.
"Ted?"
He returns to her side in an instant, hovering by her elbow.
"I need to… Mum's getting worse and… what I mean is -" Addie sighs; there's no easy way to say this, but Ted is sweet and he doesn't need to be tangled up in her messes. "What I mean is, are you happy?"
Ted's chocolate brown eyes probe her face, but Addie stares out the kitchen door, watching the rain drip off the overhang.
"Happy enough," Ted answers after a moment, pushing back the wayward cowlick on his forehead. "I wouldn't want to be a conductor forever, but it's alright. I'd move closer to Pops -"
Addie shakes her head. "I mean with me."
Ted's gaze slides to the rain, then back to her. Addie doesn't meet his eyes.
"I think so," Ted says slowly. "Aren't you?"
Addie almost nods, because she's not unhappy and Ted reminds her of someone else, but that's unfair to him and he deserves better -
Addie's answer stalls in her throat.
The moment stretches into one, two, three, the seconds marked by the rain dripping from the back door overhang.
She needs to say something. Ted gave his answer; now it's her turn.
Addie's silence stretches thin, a wire easily cut, a bond forged of almost so ready to be severed.
This should be easy.
She's good at leaving.
Ted's coat feels suddenly awkward on her shoulders. A foreign weight, comforting but borrowed - comfort that ought to belong to someone else.
Ted steps closer, his minty aftershave tickling her nose.
"I'm…" Addie swallows nerves she doesn't have a right to. It's not her heart on the line.
Still, Ted waits, more patient than she deserves.
"I'm not unhappy," she says.
It's Ted's turn to let the moment stretch, and he does - brow furrowed as he stares at her.
Addie listens to the beat of the rain and says nothing.
"… I see," he finally says.
Addie chews her lip until the skin tears. She doesn't want to look at him, but she ought to. It's the decent thing to do.
It's a mistake - because Ted's gaze is soft and understanding, and he doesn't deserve this.
"It's not you," Addie blurts. "Nothing you did, alright? I just… I'm not good at… and with Mum -"
Ted stops her with a hand on her shoulder. "It's fine, Addie. If you're not quite happy, well, that's that."
"For what it's worth, I'm sorry." Addie grips the coat around her shoulders and remembers with a start that it's not hers. She shrugs it off, folds it over her arm, and holds it out.
Ted takes it, smiles, and extends his hand. Addie grasps it without hesitation, appreciates the warmth of Ted's long fingers this last time.
"I still want to see you," Ted says, halting and a little raw. "Would that be alright? Better off not sweethearts doesn't mean we aren't good friends."
He'd still like to see her?
Addie's not in love with him, nor Ted with her, but there is some kind of love here. Fondness, care, affection. Warmth amid the cold of London's bustling streets.
Addie smiles. "I'd like that."
She tells Josie first, on another soggy London afternoon. Josie braves the rain and tracks mud halfway into the kitchen, shivering in her sock feet as Addie stokes the stove fire.
"Just a few minutes, then we'll be off." Josie sneezes into her handkerchief - starched white, lace border - and rubs her hands together.
Addie pours her a cup of the black lavender tea Josie insisted on leaving here.
"If it stops raining," Addie says.
Mum's already sick. Josie catching a cold would be different, but…
But university keeps Josie busy and she'd be beside herself if her paper on Anglo-Saxon poems was late.
Josie sniffles and blows on her tea. "Come on, it's just a little rain."
Addie arches an eyebrow as Josie sneezes again, a high-pitched, mousy squeak entirely at odds with Josie's blunt personality.
"You'll be lucky if you don't catch cold as it is," Addie says. "Don't you have term exams soon?"
"Finished last week," Josie says. "I couldn't skip two of our visits in a row; what kind of friend would I be?"
Addie pours herself a cup of lavender tea - she only ever has it when Josie is here.
"I wouldn't think less of you. University keeps you busy."
Josie scowls. "I happen to like it here, visiting with you. If you didn't, I wish you'd told me before now."
"Josie, that's not…" Addie sighs and rubs her forehead. Josie's gotten pricklier the last year or two - probably the pressure of school. "I like when you visit, alright? We're just getting older, and -"
"Is this about Ted?"
Addie busies herself with stirring her tea. Ending things with Ted was the right thing and it shouldn't matter because she still gets to see him anyway, but the sting is sharper than a paper cut.
It carries an echo, a memory - a dream - of much deeper pain she'd rather not think about. The pain of lying and doubting and running, always running from a man who looked a bit like Ted, a prince in dented, muddied armour -
"Ted and I broke up," Addie says, as much for the sake of honesty as pulling herself back to the present.
"Broke up?" Josie straightens and plops her teacup on the table, amber liquid sloshing. "Why?"
She could lie. Or she could say they're incompatible, better off friends, that her heart wasn't really in it. Any of those reasons would be a parcel of truth.
Instead, Addie shrugs and sips her tea. "Mum's sick. I can't be a good girlfriend right now."
Maybe not ever, for anyone.
Not anyone here - real - at least.
Josie's frustrated frown melts into sympathy, and Addie tries not to hate it - the undertone of pity, the shadow of understanding, like Josie knows more than she's admitted.
"Well," Josie says. "I think Ted would've done most anything for you, but alright. Just don't get any ideas about pushing me away, too."
"I wasn't -"
"Yes, you were." Josie flicks her elbow, an accusing sting. "I enjoy being here with you no matter what's got you down, and you enjoy having me here when you're not inventing inconveniences I don't care about. So don't even think about it. Haven't we stuck together this long?"
Almost thirteen years. Josie's right that those years mean something, but Josie doesn't seem to realise that nothing lasts forever.
People can always choose differently, no matter how many years you've shared.
Addie swallows a scalding mouthful of tea, grimacing at the burn. She always drinks it too fast.
"I'm losing Mum." Addie blinks her stinging eyes and silently curses her rough throat, a product of tea burns and anticipated grief. "I never had Ted, not really. Not how I… not like I should have. Sometimes I think it'd be easier if I just…"
"If you didn't have anyone?" Josie's eyes shine with water and camaraderie. The most glorious, terrifying thing about Josie is how easily she understands Addie's worst impulses, her preference for running if it spares her a greater, imaginary pain. Josie's the kind of person to run with her.
Addie doesn't bother denying it, because of all people, Josie understands.
"Believe me, I get it," Josie says. "I like my solitude, and I do better just having friends and no husband to take care of. But you're not like me, Addie. And I think you know it."
Not yet, which means she hasn't been trying hard enough.
"I want to be," Addie whispers. "I think I need to be."
Josie abandons her cup and wraps her warm hands over Addie's - equal measures of friendship and judgement.
"You've managed this long, so stop trying to be something you're not. You aren't me." Josie squeezes their joined hands around Addie's steaming teacup. "That's a good thing. You be you, I'll be me, and no matter what, we'll have each other, like any decent friends do. Alright?"
"Alright," Addie says, and she mostly believes it.
Caspian
The Lone Islands pose equal measures of danger and victory. Worse than pirates, Caspian, with Lucy, Edmund, Eustace, and Reepicheep, discovers the Lone Islands swarming with slavers, its capital of Narrowhaven overrun by the foul trade.
To his shame, their small party spends a few days in captivity, ambushed and chained like chattel because Caspian lets the spirit of adventure - and Queen Lucy's reminiscing of the grassy fields of Felimath - override his caution. There, a band of well-armed slavers twice their number await quarry. By luck or the Lion's good grace, that is how Caspian finds the first of the Seven Lords. Lord Bern buys him, thinking him a slave of fortunate face very like Caspian IX, and with a short speech, Caspian proves he is his father's son and the rightful king.
Lord Bern falls to his knees then and there, his eyes shining.
"My Lord," he says. "It is your father's voice I hear."
Caspian's eyes water. He knew he had his father's eyes and nose, but his voice, too?
Only the urgency of rescuing the others keeps Caspian from asking what else he shares with his father, and if he shares anything with his mother.
Lord Bern, whose greying beard reminds Caspian of Doctor Cornelius, is all too relieved to see him, and even more glad to have help dismantling the slave trade that the Governor Gumpas has encouraged these last decades.
"Decades?" Caspian says. "I would have come sooner had I known. Did Miraz encourage this?"
"Little love have I for your uncle," answers Lord Bern as they reach Felimath's coast, where Caspian blows a horn to signal Drinian and the Dawn Treader to fetch them. "But he had no dealings with the Lone Islands. Calormen and Telmar are their main customers, aside from Gumpas and his underlings."
Caspian rubs his sore wrists - chafed from tight bindings - and sighs in relief as the Dawn Treader's purple sail rounds the cape.
"All the more reason to stamp out this abomination."
By sunset the next day, the Lone Islands fly the Narnian flag again. Caspian deposes the useless, spineless Governor Gumpas, ends the slave trade, and appoints Lord Bern as the Duke of the Lone Islands. He spends the next fortnight sharing Narrowhaven's castle ale with as many sea captains as he can find, trading pints for tall tales and sailors' yarns of the uncharted eastern waters. Of the dozens Caspian queries, only four have heard of the Seven Lords, and only one saw them pass through.
"The Lord Bern stayed here for a girl, that's all I know," says a peg-legged, soft-spoken captain with a poet's eyes and a seaman's gait. "A fine man, that one, but a lover of land more than the sea."
Caspian agrees, finishes his drink, and thanks the captain for his time. Lord Bern already told him as much. The Seven Lords were more discreet than he thought.
The day before their scheduled departure, the Dawn Treader is inspected and repaired down to the last rope and victualled and watered as full as she can hold. Lord Bern hosts a farewell breakfast to remember at his estate in Avra, the easternmost of the Lone Islands, where he settled with his wife and three children.
The estate is a cliff-side retreat overflowing with laughter, life, and love, and Caspian understands why Lord Bern ended his eastern voyage here.
With his entire crew, Caspian feasts on roasted bird basted in red wine served cold and sliced over salad, poached eggs with salt-cured ham on toast, fresh figs, Calormen dates, and oysters on the half shell with a delicate vinaigrette. Lord Bern's dining hall brims with the lord's lively children trading mischief, to the Dawn Treader crew's merriment.
After the meal, Caspian wanders to Avra's highest peak with Lord Bern and discusses what lies farther east.
"Nothing, most likely," is Lord Bern's verdict. "But I have wondered if something lives beyond the horizon."
Caspian turns his face into the wind. The last fortnight, he's heard tales of sea serpents, magicians, a world's edge as a waterfall rushing into oblivion below, and - Reepicheep's belief - Aslan's Country.
"Do you ever wish you sailed on to find out?"
Lord Bern hesitates as the shrieks of his children, enthralled in a game of chase with Lucy, echo up the grassy hillside.
"At times, I wonder what became of the others," he says. "But I would not trade the life I have for the answer."
Caspian blinks against the sun and thinks only of the other six lords and where they might be.
Below, Lord Bern's wife calls her children, more laughter than scolding in her voice.
"You must love them very much."
Lord Bern grows solemn. "As much as your father loved you."
Caspian watches the sun dance over the waves, breathes in the sea's salt and the morning's promise of adventure, and wonders if his father loved the sea, too.
The lord claps Caspian's back. "Write to me of my companions, if you should find them. And if you reach the Utter East, I would be glad to hear of your discoveries."
"You shall have both," says Caspian, as good as a promise. "I leave the Lone Islands in your care."
"It will be a new world with the slave market closed and the trade abolished," says the lord. "I fear Calormen and Telmar may cause trouble."
"I defeated Calormen's army not two years ago," Caspian says. "And Telmar is formally allied with Narnia. I do not think they will break our treaties so quickly."
Lord Bern's bushy eyebrows jump. "In two years, you accomplished that?"
"Three," Caspian says. His victory over Calormen was only possible thanks to Narnia's alliance with Archenland, which he began re-forging with the Kings and Queens' help after his coronation.
Lord Bern bows. "Narnia is in good hands."
Good enough hands. Caspian is not unaware his kingdom might benefit from more experienced hands than his - and a heart so overflowing with love of country it has no room for other concerns - but he has done his best and so far, that has been good enough.
He has given Narnia her peace, and that counts for something.
Addie
Mum collapses at work, and she does not work again.
Addie takes a second job cleaning department stores by night to pay for in-house doctor's visits, and Mum makes her promise the neighbours won't know with the excuse that they have their own families and bills to worry with, and she can't stomach owing a debt she might not be able to pay back.
Word leaks out anyway, and Addie takes what they offer - a little money, ready-made meals, groceries, help keeping up the house and cleaning laundry. She doesn't ask for more, but Mum needs help and Mum doesn't need to know. She can keep her pride.
Mum barely notices she's gone until the doctor arrives on a morning Addie's half-witless after back-to-back shifts.
"I thought you were with Ted," Mum says, scolding, when the doctor leaves with most of Addie's cleaning money in exchange for a grim prognosis and two tiny vials of medicine that won't last a month.
"I still see him," Addie says. "He was here last week, remember?"
Mum frowns, but whatever scolding she had left dies in a coughing fit, and Addie never hears it.
Inside a month, Mum's at the hospital. She swears she's fine, insists she hates hospitals and doesn't need nurses fussing over her, but she's bedridden, never coughs without blood, and Addie is not as patient as she could be as she snaps that Mum can't even walk without help.
Part of her senses the inevitability. Addie's seen many a neighbour succumb to factory cough in the last decade, and somewhere else, in dreams or sick fantasy, she's seen death before.
More than her sparse medical knowledge, Addie knows the acrid taste of grief, knows the thorn of it in her gut.
She knows, already, when a goodbye is coming.
She also knows how to pretend it isn't.
Mum's putting on a brave face, defiant in the face of sickness the hospital's gaunt, perpetually overtired doctor can't medicate into submission.
If Mum can be brave, Addie will be brave with her.
"Adelaine?"
Addie jolts awake, Mum's cold, thin hands wrapped in both of hers. The hospital is cold, and Mum is colder.
"I'm here, Mum."
"You're here," Mum whispers. A coughing fit consumes her, wet hacking Addie's helpless to stop, painting another handkerchief in splotches of red. "Good," she manages, talking when she shouldn't. "That's good."
"Shhh, don't try to talk," Addie says, kissing pale knuckles as she offers a cup of water. "Drink this."
Mum pushes the plastic cup away, a strange light in her eyes.
"Adelaine," she says. "Adelaine, you must… when I've gone, you -"
"Don't." Addie swallows tears as useless as this hospital, harsher than she ought to be. "Don't talk like that."
Bony fingers grip her own, bruising and frantic. Mum's hoarse voice strengthens.
"When I have gone, don't stay here. I know -" Another coughing fit, worse than the last, wracking an underweight form fighting to breathe. "I know you have been unhappy," Mum rasps. "I know you… I have known grief too. I have known it every day."
Addie shakes her head, a foolish denial without conviction. She hasn't known grief like Mum has, but somewhere, somewhere inside her, there is something… something…
"I miss Dad, too," Addie murmurs.
Mum rocks her head, distress furrowing her brow. "You know what I'm saying. It's not enough to be content, you must… you must…"
Again, Addie offers water.
Again, Mum pushes it away.
"Don't stay here," Mum says again, breathing too harsh, too fast. "Leave the city. I need you to be happy, Addie. Promise me you will be. Promise you'll try."
She is, she has been, and she should say so, but the protest dies in Addie's throat, poisoned by a barb in her chest where her heart should be.
"Like I had with your father," Mum continues. "The happiness that makes your heart burst."
Addie wipes her runny nose. She might like to leave London someday, to see a bit of the world, to explore, to look for -
No, no, this is home. Mum is here, family is here, Josie is here, and she is… she is almost content. If the people she loves are happy, that will be enough.
"Promise me," Mum says. "Promise."
Tears Addie shouldn't cry spill over because she's not ready, not ready, hasn't had enough time.
Tears of fear, too, because happiness comes with loss, because if she's happy she'll lose it, and there are things people can't survive, hurts that cut too deep and she can't bear another, but another is before her all the same.
Are you so afraid of being happy?
What does it mean to make a promise? Is it a binding oath, or a comfort freely given with the strength of oak leaves - verdant green until autumn creeps in and steals its life, leaving shrivelled, brittle death in its wake?
"I'll… I'll try," Addie says. "I promise."
Let it be enough. Please, let trying be enough.
She can try. That is the best promise she can make.
Mum's breath rattles, but her mouth smiles, and she strokes Addie's cheek with a mother's affection.
"You must know how much I missed you, those years in the countryside. I had to keep you safe. You must know… you… I can't be sorry you were safe," Mum says.
The breath shivers in Addie's lungs as she kisses her mother's palm.
For the first time, she understands. Not by any particular revelation - no, comprehension dawns inside her like a stone wall crumbling before a strong wind and the passage of time.
Mum sent her away not despite loving her, but because she did. Because the ache of missing, the pain of neither of them knowing if the other was alright - that was better than both of them being in danger.
"It's alright," Addie whispers, and God help her, she means it. "I understand, Mum. It's alright."
Mum tries to sit up, and her eyes brighten to twin suns as her body sags into the bed.
"I left you alone too much," she says. "Know I'm sorry for that, too."
Too many apologies, none of them necessary, no matter how each one stitches old wounds Addie's ignored for so long they seemed healed.
"Stop," Addie chokes. "You don't need to apologise, not for anything, I…" Her voice breaks, yet she presses on, because this is important, Mum has to know how glad she is to have had her even this little while, these interrupted two decades. "You did your best," Addie says. "I love you, Mum. I know you did your best."
Mum's face smooths for a moment before a coughing fit takes her, brackish and brutal and too cruel, this sickness is too cruel.
"Go home, Adelaine," Mum says between hacks. "You don't need to see this."
Addie dries her tears and her mother's, and she offers the water. After wiping her red-stained mouth, Mum takes it.
"I'm not leaving you," Addie says. "I love you. I'm not going anywhere."
And she doesn't.
Addie does not leave the bedside again. She helps her mother sip water, rubs her back as she coughs, fetches fresh handkerchiefs, stands back and lets the nurse make Mum comfortable.
Addie stays into the night and hums her mother's favourite songs from the radio. She stays as Mum's eyes drift closed and her breath rattles, and she tells stories of timeless loves returning to each other. She stays and whispers how grateful she is for these years, for having known her, for having come back to her and knowing this home she was born to.
She stays as Mum seizes and she whispers that it's alright, she doesn't have to stay, she can go find Dad.
She stays when Mum falls slack into the pillows, her skin tinging blue. Addie whispers she loves her as she feels for a pulse and finds stillness instead.
She cries, but she stays.
Until the doctor declares the time of death and the nurse says they need the bed, Addie stays.
She stays.
The funeral is brief and blanketed by morning fog, a blur of condolences from neighbours and Mum's friends from work and bidding farewell to a boxy coffin as a preacher drones on about better places and to take comfort that she is reunited with her husband.
Addie holds her tongue through the graveside ceremony as much to keep from cursing at the preacher as to stifle her grief. It's not the preacher's fault Mum is dead. It's not anyone's fault but the factory's, the smoke and machines and the crushing, brutal grind of industry that reduces humans to numbers, workers to too-young corpses.
Ted and Josie stand on either side of her, keeping Addie standing and appropriately reserved. They don't make her heart burst, but they make it full. During this last goodbye, Addie is glad to have them there.
Glad that for all the sorrow, she is not quite alone.
A/N: A little ouchie, but the silver lining is that we're slowly clearing out obstacles to Addie wandering back to a certain place 👀
Chapter 61 Preview:
"I fear what I would have done if Aslan hadn't appeared."
"That's the thing with Aslan," Edmund says. "He's always there when we need him."