Chapter Text
It was the police who broke the fight. Peter was rapidly hoisted up by the neck and separated from the one guy who refused to run away as soon as they heard the whistle. The cheering crowd quickly scattered around the station as Peter, Edmund, and I were yelled at by the two officers. Unsurprisingly, this was nothing new.
Susan sent us annoyed glares as we grabbed our bags and sat down on the bench. Lucy, on the other hand, was rubbing Peter’s arm comfortingly.
“You’re welcome,” Edmund spat.
“I had it sorted,” Peter was quick to reply before standing up.
I shared a look with Edmund before sighing deeply. Although the past year had been hard, Peter took it the worst. Going from High King to a scrawny teenager yet again was not on his plans.
“What was it this time?” Susan spoke, making Peter turn back to us.
“He bumped me.”
“So you hit him?” Lucy asked, completely perplexed at his brother.
“No,” Peter replied. “After he bumped me, they tried to make me apologize. That’s when I hit him,” he simply answered, venom laced in his words.
“Peter,” I tried. “You need to stop lashing out every damn second.”
“Yeah,” Susan agreed. “Really, is it that hard just to walk away?”
Peter’s face quickly turned grim. “I shouldn’t have to! I mean, don’t you ever get tired of being treated like a kid?”
Edmund snorted. “Um… we are kids.” I simply nodded at his words.
“Well, I wasn’t always," Peter walked back several feet in exasperation. We all looked at each other, not knowing what to say next.
Nobody spoke about it after we came back. Nobody dared to. Fifteen years of our lives had been completely wiped out without previous notice. Any reminder of the people we were a year ago had been lost forever. We only had each other, and our memories. Anything else was simply not there. There were many nights we all spent, wandering around the house, looking for other ways back home. We never meant to leave. And we could never get back. Or so we thought.
Peter was quick to break the silence once more. “It’s been a year. How long did he expect us to wait?”
I looked down at the ground. I knew Peter was waiting for something to happen, for something to take us back. We all were at the beginning. But the days became months, and we slowly lost our faith. Sometimes I even doubted it was real. But the scar on my neck and my two silver locks usually told me otherwise.
“I think it’s time to accept that we live here,” Susan reasoned. She always reasoned. “It’s no use pretending any different.” She crossed her arms while she looked at her brother, fully knowing her words would hurt him. But to her, it did not matter. If anything, she was the only one brave enough to say out loud what we all had been thinking. There was no way back.
A cold breeze suddenly invaded the station with the distant yet coming sound of the subway. Susan groaned and turned to us quickly, panic evident in her tone.
“Pretend you’re talking to me,” she pleaded.
“We are talking to you,” noted Edmund, clearly not following the situation. Susan simply glared at him, that same look she had mastered after a decade of frowning at her surrounding stupidity when Lucy randomly got up and yelled.
“Ouch!” she shrieked. Susan tried to shush her. “Something pinched me!” Lucy looked at the bench, both confused and angry.
I then felt something hard pinching me as well. “Edmund!” I screamed after getting up, thinking it had been the boy sitting next to me.
“What? I’m not touching you!” Edmund yelled back. His confusion only grew when he got up at the same time as Susan.
“What is that?” she asked just as the train entered the station at full speed with no apparent intention of stopping.
Lucy and I exchanged looks, and the glint in her eyes answered my question even before she opened her mouth. “It feels like magic!” she grinned.
“Quick! Everyone hold hands!” Susan commanded and quickly grabbed Lucy’s and Peter’s hands in hers.
I rushed and grabbed Edmund’s hand, who was already complaining. “I’m not holding your hand!” he screamed as Peter reached for his. Peter was not having any of it, for he grabbed Edmund’s hand anyway, and we all stared unmoving as the entire train station got destroyed around us. Papers flew all around us, tiles ripped themselves off the wall, lights flickered over our heads, and the wind made breathing difficult.
The train kept rushing before our eyes until there was no train anymore, no people, and no train station.
···
We were standing inside a cave on a beach, the white sand shining brightly as soft waves crashed on the shore. A warm feeling spread through my chest as I regarded the view, feeling the warm summery salty air on my face and the wind twirling my stray hairs around. Lucy turned to look at us with an equally bright smirk on her face and her eyes twinkling in excitement, almost as if asking permission from her older brothers to run wild and free across the dunes. Immediately, Susan and she ran to the waters as they laughed, making me punch Edmund on the arm as I followed the young girls. Both boys quickly followed after me, too, until we all reached the inviting sea and carelessly played for a while. We had left our shoes and heavy jackets on the shore as we splashed each other.
Edmund was the first to notice.
“What is it?” Peter asked when he realized Edmund had stopped playing and was silently looking up to the land. I emerged back from the water, completely drenched yet feeling oddly energized, and followed his gaze despite the sun directly hurting my eyes after a year of London’s rainy skies.
“Where do you suppose we are?” was Edmund’s response. It almost was a stupid question, but the big pillar stones on the cliff even had me second-guessing my knowledge.
“Where do you think?” Peter looked at the rest of us, almost in disbelief.
“Well, I don’t remember any ruins in Narnia," I looked at Edmund, both nodding at each other confirming our thoughts.
This caught the rest of the Pevensies’ attention. We all shared the same look of confusion as we got out and initiated our way up to the ruins. As always, I walked behind them, an eternal protector of the Kings and Queens of Narnia. Peter walked up front, his stance rigid as it once was, leading his kingdom as he once had.
The ruins had been outgrown by the surrounding nature, causing a mystical yet nostalgic ambiance to remain on the ground. Huge trees sprouted out of the cracks on the stone floors, vines wrapped themselves around fallen columns, missing stairs led to nowhere, and exterior walls were completely missing. We all wandered around by ourselves, trying to understand what had happened to that place, and why had we been brought to it in the first place.
My breath got stuck in my throat as soon as I saw it. My mind was quick to work out the halls and corridors, the old rooms and balconies staring out into the waters. I had to step away quickly before they saw me, before they could realize the ruins belonged to their beloved home in Narnia – Cair Paravel. I rested my back on one of the columns, catching my breath. It had taken probably centuries for nature to grow like this into the castle. How long had it passed?
“I wonder who lived here," I heard Lucy say. My heart ached in my chest for them.
A couple of seconds went by until Susan spoke. “I think we did.”
I caught a glance of the sisters, a golden figure in Susan’s hands.
“Hey, that’s mine,” Edmund declared, who had just joined the conversation after Susan’s answer. “From my chess set," he was looking at the pawn with a strange look on his face.
“Which chess set?” Peter inquired, a bit lost.
Edmund rolled his eyes in his old fashion. “I didn’t exactly have a solid gold chess set in Finchley, did I?
“Can’t be…” Lucy whispered before running to where their old throne room sat. I kept hidden behind the column, waiting for the right moment to approach, wanting to give them space, when I heard Lucy call my name.
I found the siblings standing on their old pedestal, Lucy positioning each of them as they used to sit when they ruled.
“Don’t you see? Imagine walls. And columns, there. And a glass roof," Lucy pointed out the details as she took her rightful place by Susan’s left side. I stood out on my usual spot at the right of the pedestal, seeing the old room in my mind as the Pevensies slowly but surely came to terms with what had once been Cair Paravel.
···
Some time went by as we all took in our surroundings. We were once again mourning a life that had been stripped away from us, only this time we knew that we could never have it back. I had walked away from the old throne room, following my usual path to where my old chambers used to sit, next to Peter’s per his own request. Old memories came back with every step, my heart breaking a bit more with every glance. There was barely any remainder of what the palace had been, other than what our fantasies could remember.
I walked around one of the outside walls overlooking the sea with Edmund following closely behind. We had become close friends during their rule, both of us often complaining about Peter’s absurd war tactics. Even though we had been constantly at each other’s throats when we first met at Professor Kirke’s house, our minds finally felt in sync after he was crowned mainly due to the sarcasm fueling our veins, and how Peter had made me the head of the Narnian army, and consequently had to spend an ungodly amount of time with the two brothers.
“Catapults,” I whispered under my breath, noticing the big blocks of stone laying rather gracelessly around the ruins. Edmund quickly noticed them too, kneeling in front of one as the rest came behind us.
“Catapults,” he agreed, sending a look my way. I bit my lip in worry, the scar on my shoulder suddenly stinging. He turned to look at his siblings as I kept on looking at the fallen walls. “This didn’t just happen. Cair Paravel was attacked,” he explained, his war knowledge trying to fit the puzzle together.
Peter decisively walked forwards to the outer tower, where the hidden door to their crypt sat. Edmund and I helped him move the heavy stone until the familiar wooden door came into view. Thanks to Edmund’s convenient flashlight, we all made our way down the narrow staircase into the old crypt, where four equally large golden trunks were sitting in front of marble statues of the four Kings and Queens of Narnia. I stood back as they all reached for their respective trunks, opening them and quickly gathering their old belongings in awe.
“I can’t believe it. It’s all still here,” Peter exclaimed, looking down at one golden shield with the big lion right in the center.
“I was so tall!” Lucy wistfully said as she grabbed one of her old dresses, holding it close to her body. I quickly remembered the adult she had become, and how the glow in her eyes had never dulled.
“Well, you were older then,” Susan tenderly added, another reflection of the queen she once was.
“As opposed to hundreds of years later… when you’re younger,” I snorted in reply to Edmund’s comment, who looked ridiculous wearing a soldier helmet far too big for his head. I shook my head at him as he pointed at himself, although I did not dare move from my place at the bottom of the half-broken staircase.
Susan was frantically looking through her trunk holding her trusted bow and arrow. “My horn… I must have left it on my saddle the day we went back,” she reasoned, making all of us look down in pain.
I silently inspected all the gold weaponry on the floor but noticed the absence of my old armament. My own bow and quiver in silver detailing, as opposed to the golden ornamentation in the rulers’, my daggers, my dual swords. None of them were there. Peter was now opening his trunk, quickly taking his beloved sword, Rhindon, out of its sheath. Despite being unused, there were no traces of rust on the blade.
“When Aslan bears its teeth, winter meets its death,” he read off of it, his eyes focusing on a missing point on the wall.
With Aslan’s name came a warm feeling in my chest, the same energizing excitement I had felt at the beach.
“When he shakes his mane,” Lucy continued, “we shall have spring again,” I instinctively banged my hand over my heart, an old war cry among the Narnians. “Everyone we knew… Mr. Tumnus and the Beavers… they’re all gone,” Lucy sounded defeated, almost accepting their fate. There was no denying that our past had been lost forever, but standing there, in the heart of our old home, we knew. There was no going back.
I did not dare say a single word. We had all lost as much, but they were the ruling monarchs. I had only been a warrior.
It was Peter who spoke first. “I think it’s time we found out what’s going on.”