england / september 16, 1903

prompt: "leaves"

word count: 1,680

xXx

Polly poked her tongue out between pursed lips, squinting as she tied away the last stem of the leafy circlet in her hands, and Digory smirked to himself as he watched from the forest floor where he lay back on his elbows under a canopy of fluttering green leaves, just beginning to turn yellow.

"That looks a little Narnian, doesn't it?"

Polly glanced up and quickly back down to the crown in her hands, lifting it onto the tips of her fingers and turning it to examine the carefully interwoven stems and long grasses—not so very unlike the patterns the dwarfs had crafted into fresh-grown silver and gold.

She smiled, that familiar fond smile that always twitched irresistibly at her lips whenever he mentioned Narnia. "I suppose it does."

Digory's mother had only taught Polly to make crowns out if the long-stemmed flowers in the back garden yesterday, but she'd already moved on to the significantly more challenging task of weaving leaves, perhaps in the spirit of the rapidly approaching autumn as the summer hols began to draw to a close.

Soon she would have to go back to her stuffy London school, but it was always in the last few days of her visit that she dug herself in deepest to the wildest parts of the countryside.

She sighed contentedly. "You know, sometimes I forget all of this came from those adventures with the rings."

Digory cocked his head, turning onto his side and propping a leg up as he leaned on one elbow. "We would still have been friends, though. We were friends before you even met my uncle."

"Yes, but… if it weren't for that terrible queen, or jumping through the wrong pool, we would never have found Narnia. Or Aslan. And we would never have gone up to the garden, or gotten that apple for your mother. And— well, you know."

She flushed a little, and Digory smirked. As abrasive as she could be at times, Polly was still too tender-hearted to say his mother would probably have died without it. And then where would they be?

"You can say it. I don't mind. She's alive, and she'll outlive us all, as far as I'm concerned. Anyway, you're right. It would all have been different, if not for Narnia."

Polly laid the circlet of yellowing leaves on her lap and picked up another from the pile heaped beside her on the mossy fallen log. "Have you ever thought about telling her? About Narnia, I mean? She seems like the sort who might understand, if anyone could."

"'Course I've thought about it. Plenty of times. I want to, of course, but… I don't know, it just feels like the sort of thing you can't ever really explain, no matter how hard you try." He nodded to her, raising his eyebrows. "Be honest, would you believe it if you hadn't been there? If I told you I'd vanished clean out of the world, and met a witch who could turn iron doors to dust, and talked to a Lion, and grew a tree out of a piece of toffee, and rode on the back of a winged horse?"

She nibbled the inside of her lip for a moment. "Well, when you put it that way… I suppose you'd look madder than your uncle. But… I do hope I would at least try to believe."

Digory smiled.

"It's alright, though," she added. "As long as we both know, I suppose that's something."

He hummed in agreement.

"There." She held up two leaf crowns. "Finished."

Digory sat up, leaning over on his knees to take one of the circlets carefully from her fingers and turn it over, examining her handiwork. "Not bad, Pols, you're getting better at the weaving. I never could get the hang of it."

"Put it on," she grinned.

He obeyed, settling it onto his brown hair and pushing his bangs down into his forehead.

"There, now it really looks Narnian."

He smirked, half scoffing, but any reply he could have formulated in rebuttal was interrupted by another musical voice.

"What's that pretty word?"

They spun at the same time to spot Mabel Kirke wading carefully through the leaves and branches strewn over the forest floor, gliding like a nymph so that neither of them had heard her approach until she was only a few yards away, the lawn and the big house just visible behind her in the world of green beyond the forest edge.

"What word?" asked Digory stupidly.

His mother smiled, glancing over them and the heap of leaf crown attempts at Polly's side. "Narnian… I've heard you use it before. What does it mean?"

Polly leapt to her feet with the remaining completed circlet in her hands, offering it to Mabel with a smile. "It's just something from a story I'm writing."

Mrs. Kirke took the crown graciously and looked it over with evident approval before setting it atop her braided and bound hair, the same warm brown as her son's. "It must be quite a thrilling story," she laughed, "to keep you both so occupied."

"Oh, it's not much."

Digory could almost have believed Polly Plummer actually blushed.

"I came out to fetch you for tea," said Mrs. Kirke, "but I see you're already well occupied here. Perhaps a picnic is in order?"

"Oh, yes!" Polly clapped her hands and bounced on her toes, as if she were six rather than nearly thirteen. Mabel had a knack for bringing that sort of thing out in people, now looking ten times more like a nymph with Polly's crown in her hair.

"You should join us, Mother," said Digory from his spot on the forest floor, still sitting where Polly had left him and grinning up from under his own leafy headdress.

She returned the smile, half mischievous, as if they all shared in some wondrous secret that no one else in the world must know. "I'll be right back with a basket, then."

"Would you like any help?" asked Polly.

"Oh, no dear, I'm quite sure I can manage." Her words rang with the lilt of laughter as her skirts fluttered and she turned back toward the house, making her way just as gracefully out of the forest as she had come in.

Digory flopped down onto his back as Polly returned to her seat on the log, her golden bangs glinting in the dappled light, the knees of her stockings delightfully muddy and the hem of her play frock beginning to fray, a state of abandon that would never have been allowed back in her London home.

"You needn't have lied, you know," he said at length. "I could have thought of something."

"What lie? I've never told a lie in my life, Digory Kirke, and that's a feat in itself with what we get up to."

"But… you've never written about Narnia."

She gave no response, and he propped himself suddenly up on one elbow again, leaf crown slipping halfway off his head so that he had to reach up to catch it, brows knitting.

"Have you?"

She sighed, pulling a blonde braid over her shoulder and fidgeting with the blue ribbon at its tip. "I may have recorded our adventure… as well as I can remember it, anyway. Just for myself, you know. And who knows what I might want to do with it someday?"

Digory sat up. "Can I read it?"

Polly eyed him with vague uncertainty, and he gave a plaintive sigh.

"You never let me read anything you write."

Her pink lips twisted into the thoughtful little pucker that always indicated a tinge of embarrassment. "I… may have called you a few choice words, in the bit about Charn."

"Oh, bother that, I'm sure I deserved it at any rate, but you can't just write about a chap and then never let him read it!"

Polly smirked, and reluctantly sighed with an acquiescent shrug. "I suppose I could bring it next time I visit. And you could put down your side of things, too. There were a few parts I couldn't write properly myself."

A wide grin split his face, and he leaned back against the bed of leaves again. "I'll try to remember it all. Oh, it would make an awfully good book, wouldn't it? And nobody could say it was silly if it was in a book. Nobody says Sherlock Holmes is silly, anyhow."

Polly hummed in thought. "I wonder how many books are really about true things that nobody else would believe?"

Digory gazed up into the fluttering green canopy overhead, little spots of blue dancing like sapphires amidst the thick of the leaves and casting ever-shifting patterns of daylight over his face. "Our library is full of awfully strange books. Maybe some of them are about adventures in other worlds, too."

"We ought to look after tea," said Polly, plopping one of her previously discarded leaf crowns onto her own head and adjusting it with her palms, looking rather like a nymph herself, now. "I say, it'll be like jumping into those pools all over again!"

Digory grinned. "I'm glad to hear you're up for it this time. You weren't nearly so eager around the real pools."

Polly shot him a dry look through shaded eyes. "You should be grateful I wasn't. Who knows what sorts of beastly spots we could have found ourselves in? Why, who even knows whether we would've made it back out to write about it!"

Digory laughed.

"And anyway, I daresay this house has about as much magic in it as Uncle Andrew's attic. You never know what we'll find."

"And you're sure you're up for it?"

Polly scoffed. "I'm game if you are."

They glanced at each other with a knowing grin the moment the words left her mouth. The words which had begun all their magical adventures in the first place, before they could have had the slightest idea where any of it would lead.

And Digory wouldn't have traded them for anything in the world.