Susan Pevensie (glasswater) wrote in the100, @ 2016-04-29 12:52:00 |
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Entry tags: | !log/thread, edmund pevensie, susan pevensie |
Who: Susan Pevensie and Edmund Pevensie
What: Susan tells Edmund what she knows about their future.
When: The evening of March 30, 2151, after the battle is over and Jadis is gone.
Where: Outside Mount Weather and down by the river.
Warnings: Discussion of character death. General angst.
Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight,
At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more,
When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death,
And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.
Spring had well and truly come to Mount Weather, illustrating the Narnian prophecy. Although Edmund was fully aware of the cost of victory, not to mention a weighty conversation to come, he could not help feeling lighter than he had since the first news of the frozen animals had reached him not long after his arrival. Aslan had come, if not to Edmund personally, still in answer to their need, to Susan’s horn. For all its strangeness, this world was not totally cut off from home nor outside his sphere.
Edmund waited just outside the gates, breathing in the warm air and the scent of new blossoms. Reyna’s purple cloak still hung from his shoulders; he would return it when he met her later, and he wore his sword at his side. Its presence made him feel more like himself, more like a knight and a king and a Narnian than he could ever be in England. More practically, victory did not mean every enemy had been eliminated. Edmund kept his eyes alert, even as he enjoyed the evening.
Since the Witch, and since the Lion, Susan had taken to wearing her bow over her shoulder (and truly never keeping it far from her grip). The wary anxiety of their past several days - broken by the battle, by the presence of Aslan - had merely given her more surety. There was too much unsaid between she and her brother. Before time and trains took them from one another forever, she knew they had to speak and reconcile.
This was her Edmund. He stayed with her, listened to her, schemed with her and fled Calormen. Surely he would not side with … Aslan, you cannot sunder me from my family.
Her hair lay in a easy braid over her shoulder and besides that one Narnian touch in her bow, her own appearance seemed to assimilate into the people of Mount Weather. She wanted to be like them. She wanted to survive. But at the gate, when she saw her brother, her heart leapt into her chest. He looked much the same sailing from Calormen to their own war. And all she could think about was how fully she loved him.
Striding forward, she wound her hand into the crook of his arm and pressed her lips to his cheek.
“Ed.”
Edmund turned with a smile and returned a brotherly kiss on her forehead. "Su." He nodded to the guard on duty and then gestured towards the river. "Shall we walk?"
They had a great deal to say that they had avoided saying since coming. Most of it was Susan's. Edmund had refrained (mostly due to the solicitousness of Jacob in providing distraction when he could not sleep) from reading about their future. All he knew of it were Susan's hints at calamity to come and his own memories of the tension between them back in England. That was his apology to make, though he didn't know what the books had told her of their quarrels.
Apace and in silence she walked with him, letting her own mind quiet into contentedness until they reached the river bank. The water, swollen from the witch's melting control, roared with brown, eddying foam. The land was quick to regain its independence. She decided she loved it; for its rage, for its survival, for its sense of self. As much as a relatively logical girl could love a river, anyway.
Breaking contact with her brother, she turned to him, watching the play of young sunlight across his pale eyes. She smiled, feeling brave.
"You've made yourself a hero."
That drew half a smile. Edmund wasn't unaware that he'd garnered some attention or even unappreciative of it. It felt good to be known for something other than his failures, and, for that matter, to have achieved something (much as he wished Peter here) in the absence of his brother.
"It's not a bad feeling," he admitted. Dangerous, though, as he'd told Shepherd Book the night before. The appeal was the same as that of the wand so recently broken without the excuse of magic's influence. Fortunately, there were heroes enough in the mountain to share the acclaim. "You as well. You spoke to everyone." Quite literally, but figuratively as well.
“It suits you.” Her brow rose -- the only note of response she chose to give his summation of her own heroism (or lack thereof) -- before she knelt and relegated one hand to the slim green reeds which had only just begun to sprout.
“Remember how Dad could take one of these, bend it just so and make the best whistle?”
She didn’t know how to broach Aslan. How to wade into these murky pools without drowning.
It wasn't what they'd come to discuss, although what exactly they had come for was nebulous at best. Edmund knelt down as well. "I remember - barely." That sort of thing was before the war, and while there had been peaceful years since, they were of a different sort.
"Do you miss them?" He’d had a similar discussion with Reyna and found the question difficult to answer.
"Every day." A small truth of Susan's own to guide the way; their parents, a presence tenuous at best in England, had been almost cast aside entirely for the sake of rule.
She paused, and after a deep breath, finally turned to him. "Edmund, I --" another step closer, as if by proximity alone she could share with him.
Quietly, then. "Nothing changed. For some reason, I had hoped Aslan would show mercy if he saw us fighting alongside the right, here. But there will come a time when I am no longer friend to Narnia and all of you shall make his country your permanent home."
A neat sentence implying train whistles, lipsticks, broken bodies and fear. She caught her lip in her teeth.
"You understand, don't you?"
Edmund stood still. For a moment, he’d wanted to interrupt, but by the time she finished, there was both too much and not enough to say. “Eventually…” But he knew better than that. It had been in her words when he first arrived, in her bearing, in any number of little things. She hadn’t said soon, but it was implied.
Aslan’s country held more hope than fear for him, and he’d been to the threshold before, more than once in battle. But Narnia was behind him, and the war on Earth was over. There were fewer of those dangers. Passing over the prospect of his own death (it was too much to think about, and he spent his life on borrowed time as it was), there was the phrase all of you and the concept of separation.
“He said that?” he asked, finally. “Or you read it?” Books, however otherwise accurate, were still words on a page, subject to interpretation, but the Lion’s word was unchangeable. She’d seen Him.
“He said …” Could she remember the Lion giving way to speech at all? Only a little, perhaps, as Jadis herself backed into the corner of her cell in cowed silence. She didn’t have Lucy’s effusive personality. Her love was quieter - but unquenchable. Every time her sister had thrown herself into the golden mane, she’d held back. How did one expect to be wounded unto dying and rewarded? Even then. She sought supplication. Reassurance. Her eye had been to her siblings.
He was unshakeable then and now. Nothing is changed, Child. Not yet. “He said nothing is changed.”
“What is-” But the question wasn't for her, not really. If he’d only looked up during the battle… But would he have known what to ask if he had?
He looked down, hearing the inexorable rush of the river. “Every breath I've taken for twenty-six years is his gift,” he said. But Susan, Peter, Lucy, they were far harder to give up. “I won't go willingly, but…” If called, he’d answer.
There was nothing to say.
She expected nothing less. Perhaps on occasion to be in such a prime position, she'd take the same stance. But it was here, by the river, that she stood. Here, with a brother who'd gone from imp to contrite prince, to confidant. And whatever moment out of their own narrative was a gift. So she smiled, tentatively reaching out to welcome a touch.
"Let's not worry about that. We have so much for which to be thankful; the Witch is vanquished, we have a new world to know, we have one another. And I am thankful for you, Ed."
He took the offered hand and held it, whether for her benefit or his own, he couldn't have said. “And I, for you,” he said. Susan - who had been carrying this knowledge for weeks and likely months alone - was right. If they were always meant to be parted (not forever, surely), then with Narnia they had been given years and better ones than they would have had without, and with this world they were being given more. That was a thing to cherish.
To appreciate what they had without forgetting the past or failing to acknowledge the future. That had ever been the challenge for them all. They’d made their separate attempts and argued over the how, but could any of them really claim to have done well?
Apropos of his thoughts, he said, "I'm not sure Mum ever forgave us for growing up while we were out of her sight. Or no-" That wasn't fair, after all. "I don't think she forgave herself. She sent us away, and we came back different people." These were memories she hadn't yet lived, and Edmund wondered if offering them was a blessing or a curse, but he continued anyway. "I think she was grateful for you. You adjusted best - or hid it best. I was a bit jealous."
More than a bit jealous on some occasions, and frustrated on others. "The others have never been good at hiding their lights under bushels." It was not meant as praise or as criticism. Neither Peter nor Lucy would ever be good at seeming other than what they were. "I could pretend I wasn't more Narnian than English, but I couldn't be the same." Whatever remnants lingered to plague him of the person he'd been before Narnia and before Aslan, in his essentials, that boy had died on the Stone Table as surely as if the Witch had had her way. "Which was a blessing," he said wryly. He'd been a headache in his own way, between recurring nightmares and the fights at school when the leaders of his old crowd realized that Pevensie would no longer fall into line. "I'm sure she thought I was ill." Ill or broken by the war.
"She scrimped, borrowed every ration ticket she could, and somehow came up with Turkish Delight for my birthday." He dropped his eyes, a grim smile on his face. "I couldn't disappoint her, so I ate what I could." It hadn't been more than a piece or two, tasteless and sticking in his throat, while the others looked at him wide-eyed. "I must have looked green. You took pity on me."
"Really, Edmund you'll spoil your supper. I'll put it up for you."
Mum pursed her lips. "Susan-"
But - "Oh, if you must." - he turned such grateful eyes on his sister and pushed the box toward Susan so eagerly, that their mother stopped.
"I don't know where you put it 'for safekeeping,' but I didn't have to look at it again." He met her eyes again, the rambling finally coming to a point. "You were always gentle with me, but I haven't always been-" His wording had been coincidental until he heard himself. "-just. Back home. I said things I wish I hadn't before I came here. I meant to apologize, but if - if I don't get the chance there, I'm sorry."
The memory - the shared experience not yet lived - thus related, felt kin with Susan. As Edmund spoke it out, it was almost as if she could feel the spark of memory strike flint in the back of her mind. Their mother, clinging to the children they were, in a fine dress making a show for them.
Little did she know. But Susan had always been ready to prepare the way for her family; and if Edmund had been frustrated, he certainly had his reasons. She knew she could be tedious and dramatic, particularly without the crown. And knowing that re-treading all those formative years was before her -- a fate not altogether longed for, though English air and the end of the war still seemed more dreamlike than Lions or even this place.
She squeezed his fingers with her own.
"Gentle or just, let's here simply say what we think. We've never done well, you and I, when we haven't been wholly honest with one another." She paused. "No secrets?"
He hesitated an instant, though not out of a desire to conceal. Meaning what he said was long practiced habit now, even if he lacked their younger sister’s ability to be thoughtlessly sincere. Saying entirely what he meant took more work. There were thoughts he preferred to conquer without their ever seeing the light of day and feelings that required examination before expression. Edmund would not make a promise he didn't plan to keep, not to Susan.
At the same time, illustrations of the truth of her words played through his mind like a film reel, leaving a rueful smile on his face. Honesty was surely best for them. “No secrets,” he said, at last. “It may take me some time to shape words, but no secrets.”