[fic] Along the Midnight Edge 10/14
Dec. 31st, 2010 09:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
keire_keTitle: Along the Midnight Edge
Rating: 18
Genre: drama, romance
Pairings: Edmund/Caspian
Wordcount: 80k
Warnings: it is rated 18 for potentially disturbing themes
Summary: Narnia ended a mere two hundred years after Caspian’s reign, as though he was the climax of her 2,500 years’ history. He was. There were stories unfolding in Narnia of which none of her rulers were aware, and stories must run their natural course, even though their heroes are dead.
[CHAPTER TEN -- Debris]
It was a cold morning, six weeks later, when the cast was taken off his right leg and Edmund was allowed on his feet for the first time since the crash. He was been given crutches and a stern warning, complete with x-ray photos, that he was to avoid standing on his left leg, and his right. At all if possible.
That wasn’t possible, of course, especially as he was only able to use one crutch, due to the sorry state his right arm was in and he was determined to become mobile, even if he didn’t need the x-rays to know it wouldn’t happen overnight. The most he could do was hobble and try not to fall, with a nurse giving him the most evil look, when he attempted to stay out of bed longer than she deemed safe.
“It will take a while,” she said as he caught him wandering the long, dim corridor at dusk for the third time. “It must, if you want the bone to heal properly.”
Edmund was, at that point, too weak to even hear her words. Sweat was running down his face and yet he pushed, because his mind was driving him insane, and unless he became so tired he fell unconscious, he wouldn’t sleep at all.
“Back to bed, and no more walking until the doctor allows,” she said, not unkindly, and led him back to the room, where he fell asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow.
He dreamet of a dark land spread before him, beautiful in its icy coldness. There was no wind to move the snow around, and so it remained pristine and glittering, in the strange silvery-blue light, which moved as though it were alive.
There was a presence at his side. Light emanated from it, cold silvery light, not unlike that which drove the night away.
“You’ve come,” she whispered and Edmund felt cold fingers touch his mouth and slide onto his chest, into his chest, spreading the dreadful cold throughout him, and he could neither move nor speak, and there was such fright in him and her, such sorrow--
He sat up in the hospital bed, gasping for air. His head protested the sudden movement and he lost consciousness for a moment, for when he opened his eyes again he was flat on his back, when he didn’t remember laying down.
At the very least, he told himself, they should be safe without him, even in the cold, dead Narnia. There was some consolation in that, until he recalled Caspian’s face when he promised genocide and his thoughts suddenly lost their hopefulness.
Caspian wouldn’t be harmed. He knew this and it brought him a measure of comfort. Caspian was a tremendous bastard, at times, but he was kind and generous, as a king should. The stars needed him whole and unspoiled, if their precious messiah was to be what they needed him to be.
Edmund pulled his mostly operational leg to his chest and rested his chin on the knee. They needed Caspian’s soul, but would they still need it if it weren’t quite so pure?
Interesting issue to consider, he thought as he fell back onto the bed.
*****
He was allowed home not long afterwards, with a long list of things he was and wasn’t to do. It seemed walking was chief among the latter. Edmund chose to disregard that. His right foot gave a twinge now and then, but it was steady. The left was more problematic.
“Next week we shall see about getting the cast off,” the doctor said. “The pictures look promising. You ought to be able to walk freely in less than a month.”
Another month! Edmund smiled at the doctor and thanked him, while internally screaming bloody murder, but of course he could do nothing, for Susan had insisted on hearing the instructions as well, and promised she would see them heeded.
Of course, they had to take a train home.
“Just when I was about to say I would never take the train again,” Edmund said. He watched his reflection in the glass in the waiting room. It was like looking at a stranger -- his head had been shaved at some point, to make way for stitches, whose marks stood out against the pale skin of his temple, only partly masked by the re-growing hair. He had lost weight in the hospital; hardly a surprise given what he was fed. There were dark shadows underneath his eyes. No wonder there, either, as his sleep had been erratic since he was taken off drugs.
“I wish I didn’t have to.” Susan tapped the toe of her slipper against the floor, watching the clock. She, at least, looked radiant. Edmund was glad for it. She would be fine, he knew.
“At least you don’t have the urge to run when you’re standing on the platform.”
“I have the urge never to enter the station again.”
It took them a couple of hours to get to their parent’s house. By the time they walked through the door, late in the afternoon, Edmund was ready for a lengthy nap, possibly followed by a rest. He collapsed on the couch and let his eyes close. Just a short nap, he thought, then we would talk.
Just a moment of rest.
He woke a couple of hours later to the smell of chicken soup, the only thing that Susan could be trusted to cook. He didn’t care if it was plain; it was better than anything he had to eat in the past month.
It took but one shared glance for them to decide to abandon their childhood rooms for the time being and spend the night in their parents’ bedroom, which Susan had been using until Edmund returned home. It hurt less than looking at the empty beds, which hadn’t been used in a long while, in Peter’s and Edmund’s case, but which held in them memories of thousands of nights spent whispering secrets across the space. Edmund didn’t even try to walk in there, citing the long trek upstairs as his excuse to go straight to the bedroom.
“This is only a little awkward,” Susan said, as they crawled into the wide bed on their respective sides. “Though I admit, much better than sleeping alone.”
“Sometime in the future we’re going to have to clean out the other rooms, too.” That and more. There were finances to consider, something Susan rarely had the patience to do. There was the matter of ownership, of inheritance and wills, which Edmund suspected father had, which was only sensible during a war. There was the matter of making sure they would have a place to live, that there were funds to continue his studies and Susan’s endeavours. The house would probably have to be sold, because far as Edmund knew whatever savings Father had would only see them through so far.
Su should hurry and marry into money, he thought, making himself comfortable. She was no crusader, and it would save her much trouble in the long run.
“I fully intend to wait until you are well enough to do it on your own,” Susan said in the darkness, reaching out across the bed to hold his hand.
“Su,” Edmund started, “There’s the other thing.”
“No.”
“We are going to speak of it sometime.”
“I don’t want to!” Though the room was dark he could see her sit up in bed and turn to glare at him. “You wish to return to the fairy-tales and games of our childhood, which I understand is a comfort, but don’t you think it’s high time to move on?”
“You have not forgotten.”
She was silent for a long while. “Of course I have not forgotten,” she said at last. “But it is over and done now. We are too old, and I refuse to spend my life dreaming about fairy-tales.”
Edmund refrained from commenting that some fairy-tales were readily replaced by others. He knew Susan well enough to know she was aware of it, even if she chose to deny. “Su, I have means to get back. And I will.”
“It wasn’t real! When will you stop this? Narnia was a lovely game, but it was just a game. You are not a king. There is no place where animals talk.”
“You are in denial, Su,” Edmund said gently. “You are right; we are too old. We must know what is real and what isn’t, and Narnia is very much real.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I will prove it, if you give me the chance.”
“Edmund, now is not the time. You are to get married and build a life here! Jane is waiting for you to propose. You are not far from finishing your studies. Stop day-dreaming already!”
“Sound advice, particularly the part about getting married.” Susan, in Edmund’s opinion, had been least likely to get married of the four of them, and that included the fact that Edmund’s beloved was a man from another world and that Lucy had yet to formally discover the opposite gender existed (and, if her brothers had their way, would never make the discovery). Susan, despite the protests, had never forgotten her queenship and the grand tournaments held in her name. After such an introduction to romance, who could fault her for refusing to settle for pleasant, but boring, English men?
“Just what are you insinuating!”
“Doesn’t matter. I need to tell you some things, and these won’t be easy to hear.”
Edmund spoke concisely when he wanted to, and thus he told Susan of the death of Narnia, of heaven and the terrible events within, in less than ten minutes. He wondered at the ease with which she overlooked that it was heaven he spoke of, and focussed instead on the important parts of the tale.
“Caspian’s son tried to murder you?”
“Or his mother, depending on occasion. I know; we were all quite surprised.”
“Pardon my surprise, but after your return the last time I gathered you and Caspian were good friends. Didn’t you journey with him? Why would his family want you dead?”
Edmund laughed. “Yes, we are good friends, which we thought was the reason for their animosity.”
“I don’t think I quite understand their reasons, then. Oh, I understand that you men can be dreadfully insensitive, when you have your pals around, but you are almost civilised, and surely you wouldn’t have the power to wreck a marriage, especially not when you were in another world.”
“Caspian felt very strongly about it.”
Thankfully, Susan accepted that as a reason and moved on.
Edmund was glad, because it was not the best subject to discuss with one’s sister in bed at night, especially not when he suspected that part of the reason Susan couldn’t settle was that she still remembered Caspian and found herself lovers to remind her of him. Not because of any actual feelings, at least not presently, but because he had been the fairy-tale -- a beautiful young king, gallant and brave, who only had eyes for one maiden and would risk life and limb for her.
It spoke volumes for the differences between the two of them that, for him, Caspian was a rash, pigheaded git. Lord, how Edmund missed him.
“I also don’t understand why would you want to go back, especially now,” Susan was saying as he tried to push the image of Caspian into the back of his head. “You are safe here.”
No, he wasn’t, Edmund thought. “I worry what Caspian will get up to in my absence. I spent much of the time cooling his head,” he said. “I expect open war between him and Peter -- a bloody one. They cannot die, and I don’t think they can do too much harm to one another, but there will be conflict and there is bound to be collateral damage.”
“Well, whatever they planned on getting into, they surely already have.”
“I know. I worry about that too.” He let the worry colour his voice then. It was the truth -- he worried, constantly, since we awoke, but even the worry wasn’t half as crippling as the emptiness. How he was able to bear it after returning from the Dawn Treader he did not fully remember -- it had been like a painful wound that left a deep scar, which impeded some of his movements, but then he had found Caspian again, in a place where they weren’t separated by physical bodies, and now the absence at his side was tearing him apart.
“But Ed, we are too old. Even if it was real, and I’m not saying it is, Aslan said we are too old. We cannot return.”
Edmund grinned in the darkness, and for one the grin was not pleasant. “I know, but this concerns me. I must go. I’m sure Aslan wouldn’t mind.” And if he did, well, Edmund was dying to have a conversation on the subject. If nothing else, then to ask why would the great lion fail so utterly, and why would Edmund be punished with the sight of Peter’s dead body, surely losing him would have been enough.
“Ed,” Susan said. She was on the verge of sleep. “All right. If it pleases you, I shall promise I will go. However, you too must promise that you won’t try to leave until you are well enough to travel.”
“I didn’t ask you to go with me.”
“If you are stupid enough, if you need it to grieve, I will indulge you and I will make sure you don’t hurt yourself in the process.”
“We will need warm clothes and provisions,” he said very quietly. “The world is cold.”
“Splendid,” she murmured and then fell asleep.
Edmund watched her for a long time. She was peaceful in her sleep, with nary a horror marring her dreams. “I’m sorry,” he said, before his eyes closed and he, too, fell asleep.
*****
His convalescence took more time than he felt he could afford, especially when his mind was busy thinking up the various disasters Caspian could draw down upon their heads in his fury. Not for the first time, he wondered how could they have thought it a good idea to put the temperamental Telmarine on the throne, when he could scarcely be threatened to lose a lover before declaring war on an entire race of people in retaliation.
No, Edmund thought wryly. It was anything but a good idea. All the more important then to get back to Narnia, before irreparable damage was done.
This, in turn, prompted a long, wheezing laugh. For that he would require a time machine, and given his luck, instead of returning to the past he would wind up in the future so distant, people would grow each other like cattle. Irreparable damage had already been done. Now he needed to make sure it could be contained, however impossible the task seemed.
He flexed his right wrist and hissed. The cast had finally come off, not two days before, but he was under strict orders not to strain it. What it meant, he discovered as soon as he exited the hospital, was that he couldn’t move it at all. What it meant, in broader terms, was that his fist wouldn’t close, that he couldn’t lift anything heavier than an apple, and that if he bumped against anything at all, he had to pause and breathe, in order not to faint.
“I thought the cast was to come off today?” Susan said when she returned home, only to discover him fiddling with the radio, the cast again on his arm.
“It did. I kept it, just in case.” It had been sawn through, but if he was careful it could still serve. “I worried I might jolt it by accident.”
“The bone should be healed by now.”
“It was an open break, Su. I don’t wish to test its limits so soon.”
“You are going to test it sometime. Why not here, where hospital care is easily available?”
“Since when are you reasonable?”
“Someone has to be.”
Edmund snorted and returned to glaring at his hand. It would obey, he kept repeating over and over, by force, by persuasion, by strength of will; his own hand would obey his command, no matter how it hurt. This time his fingers twitched and curled. “This is much harder than I thought.”
Susan watched him for the longest time. “I have seen you shrug in the face of a dagger wound to the heart. You broke your leg in the tournament in Archenland, once; Peter had to threaten to tie you to the bed to keep you down.” Her eyes lost their misty quality then, when she returned from their life in Narnia back to England. “I have seen you bleed all over the floor when you hit your forehead against the fireplace, and yet you wouldn’t stop running.”
“There’s some point to this reminiscing, I presume?”
“The point is: what happened, Ed?”
“As for the first two, I would like to remind you that we were at most a couple of days away from Lucy’s cordial, so no wound was scary then. As to the other, as I recall I was four at the time.”
“I don’t like this,” Susan said. “I wish you would wait until you are properly healed.”
“This might take a year, or more,” Edmund said. “I’m told the chance of a renewed break within a year is high, as the bone is likely to be weak.”
“So your solution is to wander into open conflict, with people who you tell me could best Peter without even taking a hit?”
“I can’t wait that long!” Edmund stood and glared at Susan. “I can hardly wait another day! It’s killing me, Su. I can’t breathe!”
She was silent and he trembled, until he looked down and a strange kind of calm descended. His right hand was curled into a fist, and it hurt, lord, did it hurt, but it responded to his commands at long last.
“When did you plan on leaving?” Susan asked.
“A week.”
“A month.”
“Eight days.”
“Two weeks, Ed. That’s my final word.”
“Fine.” Two weeks was too much. A week was too much. Frankly, Edmund thought as he watched his fingers spasm as he flexed them, an hour felt like an eternity. He would honour the agreement, however. Two weeks, to the day.
He whiled the days away cleaning out the house, while Susan went to work. He wasn’t quite up to the task yet. He got tired far too easily, and the less was said about his mental state, the better, but he forced himself to go through Peter’s and Lucy’s clothes, to throw out what was too old and pack what wasn’t to be delivered to those could use them. He packed away Lucy’s fairy-tales and Peter’s books, her dolls (all three of them) and his aeroplanes. He gathered the pictures they had all painted one afternoon, a few years before the war broke out. He burned those in the fireplace.
There were papers in their parents’ bedroom; deeds to the house, Father’s will and more. There was a little money, though more than Edmund expected, deposited in a bank. He and Susan decided to put the house up for sale. To their surprise they found a buyer sooner than they expected -- so soon, in fact, that they weren’t quite ready to move out. Fortunately the interested party agreed to wait.
That was it, then, Edmund thought as he packed the last box from his and Peter’s room. Some of the things they were taking along with them -- he would be returning to the dorms for the remainder of his studies, while Susan would stay with Aunt Alberta, until she found a place of her own.
It was a blessing that she wasn’t home when Edmund sorted their things. He had set aside a couple boxes of his things, just to maintain the pretence, but the effort he was willing to put into pretending he was coming back was very limited.
When he was done with cleaning and the house was empty and cold, Edmund sat on the bed and stared at the wall, free of pictures, and the knick-knacks he and Peter had hung up at various times of their lives and never got around to taking down. He’d thrown most of them away.
“Someone had to sign the death warrant, Pete,” he said out loud, for no particular reason.
“You shouldn’t even have known about this kind of things. You are a child,” Peter’s voice replied in his memory.
Peter had considered it his greatest failure, Edmund later realised; that the very first warrant for a man’s death when they ruled Narnia -- there was a modicum of comfort in the knowledge that he had been a murderer and that there had been no question about his guilt -- had been signed by Edmund and carried out before the High King could return from a hunting trip.
He had been twelve. He had seen to the execution himself.
After the White Witch had been defeated, humans had swarmed into Narnia. Well, not so much swarmed, perhaps, but there were enough who remembered they hailed from the land, whose ancestors had survived the purge, and who were eager to return. Not all of them had been worth keeping, and plenty didn’t take well to the court ruled by four children. They’d had very little time to get used to the idea that adults were not always to be trusted, that their splendid, horrifying, bloody victory was only the beginning of the war that was kingship.
Edmund shook his head. Peter would rather march against giants over and over than become tangled in the politics of ruling the country, which had been just as well. Narnia needed a magnificent king to recover after the reign of the White Witch, and Peter fitted the bill. Lucy couldn’t be sullied by the dirty business, despite her occasional vengeful heroics, and Susan was too kind-hearted to even think about putting a man to death. Edmund hadn’t had the heart to mind, when there had been no one else to do it.
Even that had been a lie.
“Edmund,” Peter had said again, taking a seat on the chair opposite. Edmund had rarely seen him so miserable. “I was going to do it, as soon as I returned. You shouldn’t have gone behind my back.”
“No. You were going to have a hot bath after you returned and then you were going to listen to the news of what transpired in your absence. You were going to hope he died in his cell in the meantime.” Edmund had hesitated and clenched his hands around the armrests of his chair. They wouldn’t stop shaking. “It had to be done.”
Peter had touched the golden circlet in his hair and stepped around the table, to grip Edmund’s shoulders. “Thank you, brother,” he had said.
Later that night Edmund had cried himself to sleep. He’d thought it’d been necessary. His hands had shaken badly, though he’d managed to hide most of it when he watched the headsman take a swing and with it the prisoner’s head. He hadn’t blinked. He’d watched as they took the body away, loaded it onto a cart and took it outside, to bury the man where no one would see or think of him again, and on his tongue he tasted powdered sugar and rose water.
He had woken in the middle of the night, calm and peaceful, and watched the moon shine into his chamber, watched it stare into his face and he knew that the moon saw no sadness and no guilt there.
There had been none. He had condemned a man to death; he had seen him die and there was no guilt, no doubt in him. He had been right. The single act had tempered some of the more patronising advice (he deemed it paternal) dispensed by the lord Balnor, who couldn’t have been less subtle about desiring the position of high lord chancellor, to whom most major decisions in the country fell. Edmund recalled the look on his face, as he had come to witness the execution, no doubt expecting Edmund to call it off at the last moment.
Even Lucy had noticed Balnor had quieted.
It had been gratifying to see some of the human courtiers give him a wider than usual berth, afterwards. It had been exciting to see them avoid his gaze, whenever he was angry and let it be known. It had been terrifying, shameful, horrid, and the taste of sugar and snow never left his mouth, even as he learned to affect a childish innocence in dealings with others.
He had fooled even Peter with his doe-eyed looks, even if he had had to suffer coddling and tearful apologies and promises to take up the mantle that Edmund had needed to see unkept.
“Pete.” In the silence of their shared childhood room the name was loud as a curse. “You bloody bastard,” Edmund said, but he said it fondly.
The situation really was simple, he thought in wonder as it unravelled in his thoughts. The stars must have their saviour, else there would be no peace for either him or Caspian. For that reason he needed to die in Narnia, to spare everyone the long and pointless search throughout Aslan’s country.
He picked up a pen from the desk and attempted to twirl it in the fingers of his right hand, like he had done whenever the occasion demanded a letter and inspiration was scarce, but such tricks proved too much for his damaged hand. Writing was just enough of a challenge to keep him occupied until Susan returned.
Rating: 18
Genre: drama, romance
Pairings: Edmund/Caspian
Wordcount: 80k
Warnings: it is rated 18 for potentially disturbing themes
Summary: Narnia ended a mere two hundred years after Caspian’s reign, as though he was the climax of her 2,500 years’ history. He was. There were stories unfolding in Narnia of which none of her rulers were aware, and stories must run their natural course, even though their heroes are dead.
[CHAPTER TEN -- Debris]
It was a cold morning, six weeks later, when the cast was taken off his right leg and Edmund was allowed on his feet for the first time since the crash. He was been given crutches and a stern warning, complete with x-ray photos, that he was to avoid standing on his left leg, and his right. At all if possible.
That wasn’t possible, of course, especially as he was only able to use one crutch, due to the sorry state his right arm was in and he was determined to become mobile, even if he didn’t need the x-rays to know it wouldn’t happen overnight. The most he could do was hobble and try not to fall, with a nurse giving him the most evil look, when he attempted to stay out of bed longer than she deemed safe.
“It will take a while,” she said as he caught him wandering the long, dim corridor at dusk for the third time. “It must, if you want the bone to heal properly.”
Edmund was, at that point, too weak to even hear her words. Sweat was running down his face and yet he pushed, because his mind was driving him insane, and unless he became so tired he fell unconscious, he wouldn’t sleep at all.
“Back to bed, and no more walking until the doctor allows,” she said, not unkindly, and led him back to the room, where he fell asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow.
He dreamet of a dark land spread before him, beautiful in its icy coldness. There was no wind to move the snow around, and so it remained pristine and glittering, in the strange silvery-blue light, which moved as though it were alive.
There was a presence at his side. Light emanated from it, cold silvery light, not unlike that which drove the night away.
“You’ve come,” she whispered and Edmund felt cold fingers touch his mouth and slide onto his chest, into his chest, spreading the dreadful cold throughout him, and he could neither move nor speak, and there was such fright in him and her, such sorrow--
He sat up in the hospital bed, gasping for air. His head protested the sudden movement and he lost consciousness for a moment, for when he opened his eyes again he was flat on his back, when he didn’t remember laying down.
At the very least, he told himself, they should be safe without him, even in the cold, dead Narnia. There was some consolation in that, until he recalled Caspian’s face when he promised genocide and his thoughts suddenly lost their hopefulness.
Caspian wouldn’t be harmed. He knew this and it brought him a measure of comfort. Caspian was a tremendous bastard, at times, but he was kind and generous, as a king should. The stars needed him whole and unspoiled, if their precious messiah was to be what they needed him to be.
Edmund pulled his mostly operational leg to his chest and rested his chin on the knee. They needed Caspian’s soul, but would they still need it if it weren’t quite so pure?
Interesting issue to consider, he thought as he fell back onto the bed.
*****
He was allowed home not long afterwards, with a long list of things he was and wasn’t to do. It seemed walking was chief among the latter. Edmund chose to disregard that. His right foot gave a twinge now and then, but it was steady. The left was more problematic.
“Next week we shall see about getting the cast off,” the doctor said. “The pictures look promising. You ought to be able to walk freely in less than a month.”
Another month! Edmund smiled at the doctor and thanked him, while internally screaming bloody murder, but of course he could do nothing, for Susan had insisted on hearing the instructions as well, and promised she would see them heeded.
Of course, they had to take a train home.
“Just when I was about to say I would never take the train again,” Edmund said. He watched his reflection in the glass in the waiting room. It was like looking at a stranger -- his head had been shaved at some point, to make way for stitches, whose marks stood out against the pale skin of his temple, only partly masked by the re-growing hair. He had lost weight in the hospital; hardly a surprise given what he was fed. There were dark shadows underneath his eyes. No wonder there, either, as his sleep had been erratic since he was taken off drugs.
“I wish I didn’t have to.” Susan tapped the toe of her slipper against the floor, watching the clock. She, at least, looked radiant. Edmund was glad for it. She would be fine, he knew.
“At least you don’t have the urge to run when you’re standing on the platform.”
“I have the urge never to enter the station again.”
It took them a couple of hours to get to their parent’s house. By the time they walked through the door, late in the afternoon, Edmund was ready for a lengthy nap, possibly followed by a rest. He collapsed on the couch and let his eyes close. Just a short nap, he thought, then we would talk.
Just a moment of rest.
He woke a couple of hours later to the smell of chicken soup, the only thing that Susan could be trusted to cook. He didn’t care if it was plain; it was better than anything he had to eat in the past month.
It took but one shared glance for them to decide to abandon their childhood rooms for the time being and spend the night in their parents’ bedroom, which Susan had been using until Edmund returned home. It hurt less than looking at the empty beds, which hadn’t been used in a long while, in Peter’s and Edmund’s case, but which held in them memories of thousands of nights spent whispering secrets across the space. Edmund didn’t even try to walk in there, citing the long trek upstairs as his excuse to go straight to the bedroom.
“This is only a little awkward,” Susan said, as they crawled into the wide bed on their respective sides. “Though I admit, much better than sleeping alone.”
“Sometime in the future we’re going to have to clean out the other rooms, too.” That and more. There were finances to consider, something Susan rarely had the patience to do. There was the matter of ownership, of inheritance and wills, which Edmund suspected father had, which was only sensible during a war. There was the matter of making sure they would have a place to live, that there were funds to continue his studies and Susan’s endeavours. The house would probably have to be sold, because far as Edmund knew whatever savings Father had would only see them through so far.
Su should hurry and marry into money, he thought, making himself comfortable. She was no crusader, and it would save her much trouble in the long run.
“I fully intend to wait until you are well enough to do it on your own,” Susan said in the darkness, reaching out across the bed to hold his hand.
“Su,” Edmund started, “There’s the other thing.”
“No.”
“We are going to speak of it sometime.”
“I don’t want to!” Though the room was dark he could see her sit up in bed and turn to glare at him. “You wish to return to the fairy-tales and games of our childhood, which I understand is a comfort, but don’t you think it’s high time to move on?”
“You have not forgotten.”
She was silent for a long while. “Of course I have not forgotten,” she said at last. “But it is over and done now. We are too old, and I refuse to spend my life dreaming about fairy-tales.”
Edmund refrained from commenting that some fairy-tales were readily replaced by others. He knew Susan well enough to know she was aware of it, even if she chose to deny. “Su, I have means to get back. And I will.”
“It wasn’t real! When will you stop this? Narnia was a lovely game, but it was just a game. You are not a king. There is no place where animals talk.”
“You are in denial, Su,” Edmund said gently. “You are right; we are too old. We must know what is real and what isn’t, and Narnia is very much real.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I will prove it, if you give me the chance.”
“Edmund, now is not the time. You are to get married and build a life here! Jane is waiting for you to propose. You are not far from finishing your studies. Stop day-dreaming already!”
“Sound advice, particularly the part about getting married.” Susan, in Edmund’s opinion, had been least likely to get married of the four of them, and that included the fact that Edmund’s beloved was a man from another world and that Lucy had yet to formally discover the opposite gender existed (and, if her brothers had their way, would never make the discovery). Susan, despite the protests, had never forgotten her queenship and the grand tournaments held in her name. After such an introduction to romance, who could fault her for refusing to settle for pleasant, but boring, English men?
“Just what are you insinuating!”
“Doesn’t matter. I need to tell you some things, and these won’t be easy to hear.”
Edmund spoke concisely when he wanted to, and thus he told Susan of the death of Narnia, of heaven and the terrible events within, in less than ten minutes. He wondered at the ease with which she overlooked that it was heaven he spoke of, and focussed instead on the important parts of the tale.
“Caspian’s son tried to murder you?”
“Or his mother, depending on occasion. I know; we were all quite surprised.”
“Pardon my surprise, but after your return the last time I gathered you and Caspian were good friends. Didn’t you journey with him? Why would his family want you dead?”
Edmund laughed. “Yes, we are good friends, which we thought was the reason for their animosity.”
“I don’t think I quite understand their reasons, then. Oh, I understand that you men can be dreadfully insensitive, when you have your pals around, but you are almost civilised, and surely you wouldn’t have the power to wreck a marriage, especially not when you were in another world.”
“Caspian felt very strongly about it.”
Thankfully, Susan accepted that as a reason and moved on.
Edmund was glad, because it was not the best subject to discuss with one’s sister in bed at night, especially not when he suspected that part of the reason Susan couldn’t settle was that she still remembered Caspian and found herself lovers to remind her of him. Not because of any actual feelings, at least not presently, but because he had been the fairy-tale -- a beautiful young king, gallant and brave, who only had eyes for one maiden and would risk life and limb for her.
It spoke volumes for the differences between the two of them that, for him, Caspian was a rash, pigheaded git. Lord, how Edmund missed him.
“I also don’t understand why would you want to go back, especially now,” Susan was saying as he tried to push the image of Caspian into the back of his head. “You are safe here.”
No, he wasn’t, Edmund thought. “I worry what Caspian will get up to in my absence. I spent much of the time cooling his head,” he said. “I expect open war between him and Peter -- a bloody one. They cannot die, and I don’t think they can do too much harm to one another, but there will be conflict and there is bound to be collateral damage.”
“Well, whatever they planned on getting into, they surely already have.”
“I know. I worry about that too.” He let the worry colour his voice then. It was the truth -- he worried, constantly, since we awoke, but even the worry wasn’t half as crippling as the emptiness. How he was able to bear it after returning from the Dawn Treader he did not fully remember -- it had been like a painful wound that left a deep scar, which impeded some of his movements, but then he had found Caspian again, in a place where they weren’t separated by physical bodies, and now the absence at his side was tearing him apart.
“But Ed, we are too old. Even if it was real, and I’m not saying it is, Aslan said we are too old. We cannot return.”
Edmund grinned in the darkness, and for one the grin was not pleasant. “I know, but this concerns me. I must go. I’m sure Aslan wouldn’t mind.” And if he did, well, Edmund was dying to have a conversation on the subject. If nothing else, then to ask why would the great lion fail so utterly, and why would Edmund be punished with the sight of Peter’s dead body, surely losing him would have been enough.
“Ed,” Susan said. She was on the verge of sleep. “All right. If it pleases you, I shall promise I will go. However, you too must promise that you won’t try to leave until you are well enough to travel.”
“I didn’t ask you to go with me.”
“If you are stupid enough, if you need it to grieve, I will indulge you and I will make sure you don’t hurt yourself in the process.”
“We will need warm clothes and provisions,” he said very quietly. “The world is cold.”
“Splendid,” she murmured and then fell asleep.
Edmund watched her for a long time. She was peaceful in her sleep, with nary a horror marring her dreams. “I’m sorry,” he said, before his eyes closed and he, too, fell asleep.
*****
His convalescence took more time than he felt he could afford, especially when his mind was busy thinking up the various disasters Caspian could draw down upon their heads in his fury. Not for the first time, he wondered how could they have thought it a good idea to put the temperamental Telmarine on the throne, when he could scarcely be threatened to lose a lover before declaring war on an entire race of people in retaliation.
No, Edmund thought wryly. It was anything but a good idea. All the more important then to get back to Narnia, before irreparable damage was done.
This, in turn, prompted a long, wheezing laugh. For that he would require a time machine, and given his luck, instead of returning to the past he would wind up in the future so distant, people would grow each other like cattle. Irreparable damage had already been done. Now he needed to make sure it could be contained, however impossible the task seemed.
He flexed his right wrist and hissed. The cast had finally come off, not two days before, but he was under strict orders not to strain it. What it meant, he discovered as soon as he exited the hospital, was that he couldn’t move it at all. What it meant, in broader terms, was that his fist wouldn’t close, that he couldn’t lift anything heavier than an apple, and that if he bumped against anything at all, he had to pause and breathe, in order not to faint.
“I thought the cast was to come off today?” Susan said when she returned home, only to discover him fiddling with the radio, the cast again on his arm.
“It did. I kept it, just in case.” It had been sawn through, but if he was careful it could still serve. “I worried I might jolt it by accident.”
“The bone should be healed by now.”
“It was an open break, Su. I don’t wish to test its limits so soon.”
“You are going to test it sometime. Why not here, where hospital care is easily available?”
“Since when are you reasonable?”
“Someone has to be.”
Edmund snorted and returned to glaring at his hand. It would obey, he kept repeating over and over, by force, by persuasion, by strength of will; his own hand would obey his command, no matter how it hurt. This time his fingers twitched and curled. “This is much harder than I thought.”
Susan watched him for the longest time. “I have seen you shrug in the face of a dagger wound to the heart. You broke your leg in the tournament in Archenland, once; Peter had to threaten to tie you to the bed to keep you down.” Her eyes lost their misty quality then, when she returned from their life in Narnia back to England. “I have seen you bleed all over the floor when you hit your forehead against the fireplace, and yet you wouldn’t stop running.”
“There’s some point to this reminiscing, I presume?”
“The point is: what happened, Ed?”
“As for the first two, I would like to remind you that we were at most a couple of days away from Lucy’s cordial, so no wound was scary then. As to the other, as I recall I was four at the time.”
“I don’t like this,” Susan said. “I wish you would wait until you are properly healed.”
“This might take a year, or more,” Edmund said. “I’m told the chance of a renewed break within a year is high, as the bone is likely to be weak.”
“So your solution is to wander into open conflict, with people who you tell me could best Peter without even taking a hit?”
“I can’t wait that long!” Edmund stood and glared at Susan. “I can hardly wait another day! It’s killing me, Su. I can’t breathe!”
She was silent and he trembled, until he looked down and a strange kind of calm descended. His right hand was curled into a fist, and it hurt, lord, did it hurt, but it responded to his commands at long last.
“When did you plan on leaving?” Susan asked.
“A week.”
“A month.”
“Eight days.”
“Two weeks, Ed. That’s my final word.”
“Fine.” Two weeks was too much. A week was too much. Frankly, Edmund thought as he watched his fingers spasm as he flexed them, an hour felt like an eternity. He would honour the agreement, however. Two weeks, to the day.
He whiled the days away cleaning out the house, while Susan went to work. He wasn’t quite up to the task yet. He got tired far too easily, and the less was said about his mental state, the better, but he forced himself to go through Peter’s and Lucy’s clothes, to throw out what was too old and pack what wasn’t to be delivered to those could use them. He packed away Lucy’s fairy-tales and Peter’s books, her dolls (all three of them) and his aeroplanes. He gathered the pictures they had all painted one afternoon, a few years before the war broke out. He burned those in the fireplace.
There were papers in their parents’ bedroom; deeds to the house, Father’s will and more. There was a little money, though more than Edmund expected, deposited in a bank. He and Susan decided to put the house up for sale. To their surprise they found a buyer sooner than they expected -- so soon, in fact, that they weren’t quite ready to move out. Fortunately the interested party agreed to wait.
That was it, then, Edmund thought as he packed the last box from his and Peter’s room. Some of the things they were taking along with them -- he would be returning to the dorms for the remainder of his studies, while Susan would stay with Aunt Alberta, until she found a place of her own.
It was a blessing that she wasn’t home when Edmund sorted their things. He had set aside a couple boxes of his things, just to maintain the pretence, but the effort he was willing to put into pretending he was coming back was very limited.
When he was done with cleaning and the house was empty and cold, Edmund sat on the bed and stared at the wall, free of pictures, and the knick-knacks he and Peter had hung up at various times of their lives and never got around to taking down. He’d thrown most of them away.
“Someone had to sign the death warrant, Pete,” he said out loud, for no particular reason.
“You shouldn’t even have known about this kind of things. You are a child,” Peter’s voice replied in his memory.
Peter had considered it his greatest failure, Edmund later realised; that the very first warrant for a man’s death when they ruled Narnia -- there was a modicum of comfort in the knowledge that he had been a murderer and that there had been no question about his guilt -- had been signed by Edmund and carried out before the High King could return from a hunting trip.
He had been twelve. He had seen to the execution himself.
After the White Witch had been defeated, humans had swarmed into Narnia. Well, not so much swarmed, perhaps, but there were enough who remembered they hailed from the land, whose ancestors had survived the purge, and who were eager to return. Not all of them had been worth keeping, and plenty didn’t take well to the court ruled by four children. They’d had very little time to get used to the idea that adults were not always to be trusted, that their splendid, horrifying, bloody victory was only the beginning of the war that was kingship.
Edmund shook his head. Peter would rather march against giants over and over than become tangled in the politics of ruling the country, which had been just as well. Narnia needed a magnificent king to recover after the reign of the White Witch, and Peter fitted the bill. Lucy couldn’t be sullied by the dirty business, despite her occasional vengeful heroics, and Susan was too kind-hearted to even think about putting a man to death. Edmund hadn’t had the heart to mind, when there had been no one else to do it.
Even that had been a lie.
“Edmund,” Peter had said again, taking a seat on the chair opposite. Edmund had rarely seen him so miserable. “I was going to do it, as soon as I returned. You shouldn’t have gone behind my back.”
“No. You were going to have a hot bath after you returned and then you were going to listen to the news of what transpired in your absence. You were going to hope he died in his cell in the meantime.” Edmund had hesitated and clenched his hands around the armrests of his chair. They wouldn’t stop shaking. “It had to be done.”
Peter had touched the golden circlet in his hair and stepped around the table, to grip Edmund’s shoulders. “Thank you, brother,” he had said.
Later that night Edmund had cried himself to sleep. He’d thought it’d been necessary. His hands had shaken badly, though he’d managed to hide most of it when he watched the headsman take a swing and with it the prisoner’s head. He hadn’t blinked. He’d watched as they took the body away, loaded it onto a cart and took it outside, to bury the man where no one would see or think of him again, and on his tongue he tasted powdered sugar and rose water.
He had woken in the middle of the night, calm and peaceful, and watched the moon shine into his chamber, watched it stare into his face and he knew that the moon saw no sadness and no guilt there.
There had been none. He had condemned a man to death; he had seen him die and there was no guilt, no doubt in him. He had been right. The single act had tempered some of the more patronising advice (he deemed it paternal) dispensed by the lord Balnor, who couldn’t have been less subtle about desiring the position of high lord chancellor, to whom most major decisions in the country fell. Edmund recalled the look on his face, as he had come to witness the execution, no doubt expecting Edmund to call it off at the last moment.
Even Lucy had noticed Balnor had quieted.
It had been gratifying to see some of the human courtiers give him a wider than usual berth, afterwards. It had been exciting to see them avoid his gaze, whenever he was angry and let it be known. It had been terrifying, shameful, horrid, and the taste of sugar and snow never left his mouth, even as he learned to affect a childish innocence in dealings with others.
He had fooled even Peter with his doe-eyed looks, even if he had had to suffer coddling and tearful apologies and promises to take up the mantle that Edmund had needed to see unkept.
“Pete.” In the silence of their shared childhood room the name was loud as a curse. “You bloody bastard,” Edmund said, but he said it fondly.
The situation really was simple, he thought in wonder as it unravelled in his thoughts. The stars must have their saviour, else there would be no peace for either him or Caspian. For that reason he needed to die in Narnia, to spare everyone the long and pointless search throughout Aslan’s country.
He picked up a pen from the desk and attempted to twirl it in the fingers of his right hand, like he had done whenever the occasion demanded a letter and inspiration was scarce, but such tricks proved too much for his damaged hand. Writing was just enough of a challenge to keep him occupied until Susan returned.
