Chapter Text
You are nothing.
The world is heavy on your shoulders, self-imposed, unyielding. Your shoulders are fracturing. Your composure is crumbling.
Your head aches with centuries not of you, your body aches with days, hours, minutes, seconds that are entirely yours.
The sun is too-bright, too-light. The sun is burning you, your skin is blackened and crisped from it, peeling, bleeding. Heat is crawling up your throat, tearing its way through your bones. You’re withering away to ash.
Your sister’s palm is too warm, her ferver burns gently against your fingertips, her eye’s shine with her persevering grace, persevering perfection, persevering accusation.
Your hands are ice.
The trees don’t love you, they bend and wave and you trip and flounder over their roots, slam your nose against their bark, get a breath filled with leaves. They’re choking you, vines crawling up your throat, burying themselves deep in your lungs.
Your brother is a force to be reckoned with, his anger burns bright and sharp and is tempered by his own just grace.
You cough up flowers and seeds, your throat aches with thorns.
Water is filling your lungs, deafening you, destroying you, drowning you. Your chest aches, your voice is waterlogged. The sea is pressing you beneath its waves, burying you in its rage. You cannot breathe, you're not sure you ever were able.
Your sister’s voice is quiet and dear, her bravery is valiant but it’s inscrutable. Her eyes are ebony when she meets your gaze, the whites ivory, her teeth are rubies.
Liquid is rushing between your teeth, skating across your tongue.
Narnia is crumbling beneath you and your too-old mind is compacted into a far too young child-body.
You are nothing.
The sun is dull in England. You are far too pale and your throat is dry and your tongue heavy where it sits behind your teeth.
The Gentle Queen will not meet your gaze. At every turn, every brink, every stumble, she averts her gaze, lets her shoulders drop, sweeps away. Her lips are cherry red, lipstick, not blood.
Your hands are warm, clammy when you reach toward Susan.
Your lungs are clear. Your lungs are filled with dust, with the wails of the grieving. England is a cruel reality and it’s far from wild enough for your headaches to cease. Your nose bleeds regularly from the dry air.
The Just King is quiet. He murmurs in the dead of night, presses opinion into the dark corners of your shared room, tucks his thoughts into your hands and leaves them there to rot.
You develop a cold. Your once-mother coaxes cough syrup down your throat and your sleep is far from restful, but the cold is gone by morning.
Your voice is too loud, it echoes in the quiet of your house. Your steps are like the chime of a school bell, the streets are filled with smog and you kick up dust with every shift of your feet.
The Valiant Queen is tired. Her shoulders droop, she leans against your side, chin low to her chest. Her eyes are fogged over, teeth pearly white.
Your mouth is oddly dry, tongue sticking to your teeth with every word you speak.
You are nothing.
Narnia is wailing. She’s older, older in the ruins of your once-home, older in the seas that used to be land, older in the towering orchards that you helped plant, dirt smudged across your cheeks.
The boy-prince is smothered in awe, skin unblemished, teeth not yet dripping red. By the time you leave his blood stains your fingertips. It’s dried against the walls of the How, rhythmic runes that you’d mastered when you were younger than he.
Your voice aches with Narnia’s symphony crawling up your throat.
Aslan presses His forehead to yours and your tears drip steadily into His fur.
You know deep in your bones that this is the last time you will properly step foot into Narnia. She cries, Her voice rumbling through the grass, the trees, the sea is raging, Her mountains groan and creak and you’re gone between one breath and the next.
Your voice is nothing but ash on the wind, your breath nothing but dust. Your body is nothing but blood pulsing through veins.
You are nothing.
You are High King of a nation that doesn’t exist. Fact and fiction are melting together, fraying at the edges and falling into tattered rags that tangle around your feet, trip you, chase you.
Your body is buried under twisted metal and fire has long eaten away at your flesh, your bones are crumbling. Your heart is still, unbeating, unbleeding.
Your sister used to be just another Pevensie, now, she’s Susan, the poor girl who lost her family in one fell swoop. The rumors, you know, will eat away at her until she’s blood red lipstick and stockings and fine dresses and finer jewelry, until her heart is beating in her hands, blood dripping down the curves of her palms.
Aslan tells you to breathe.
(Water pressing against your skin, creeping into your lungs, choking you of your life.)
Lucy tells you to have faith.
(Hot flame licking at your heels, the crown is heavy and gold, and garish in its wealth.)
Edmund simply presses his shoulder to yours.
(The grass weaves through your boots, vines crawling up your legs. Someone, you can’t quite remember who, wove you a flower crown once, made of poppies and roses, and kingsblood flowers at center.)
Susan is kind and brave and lives a rich life, love spilling from its seams.
When she arrives, a golden band on her ring finger and her hair streaked full of grey she murmurs gently, “How are you, Peter?”
Your heart aches, for you are nothing.
(“What are you, Peter?”)