Chapter Text
"Peace is what they tell me. Love, I am unholy."
-Torn, Creed
Mr. Pevensie had always been a grave, quiet sort of man, so to a stranger’s eye it would seem his disposition had changed little after the war, but Mrs. Pevensie noticed, and his children also noticed. There was something colder in him now, an aloofness, as if he were afraid that they would break, or perhaps he would. They did not doubt he still loved them, of course. No one could doubt the love of such a hard working, honest man, even if affectionate touches and laughter were few, and quickly withdrawn once given.
Mr. Pevensie noticed things about his children, too. He noticed his boys exchange glances when he went to work weary after a night spent sleepless. He saw his girls working in tandem to greet him when he returned, divesting him of coat and boots as if they had done it a thousand times before. He saw all four in whispered conversation that went silent when he entered the room, and his heart ached to think of the time when he too had been a confidant. So he tried harder, smiled longer, patted heads like he used to, pretended he wasn’t tired every morning, tried, tried to sleep.
While valiant, he could not help but feel that his efforts only created greater distance, as if his children could sense the lies. Mrs. Pevensie told him to take his time, that he’d been away for a while and everyone would have to get used to him being in the house again, and he told her he was sure that was it. What he didn’t tell her was that he didn’t know if he’d fit into this house ever again. Lucy’s laugh was so sweet, ringing and gentle, her feet still pattering bare about the house, and Edmund’s shoulders were still so small. Then there was Susan, dear tender Susan, who would be a great beauty someday, but still had the baby fat round her cheeks, and even Peter’s wrists and ankles poked out of his shirt and trousers as he continued to grow. There had been some soldiers like that, drowning in their uniforms, lucky to live long enough to outgrow them.
They’d belonged in a world such as this, a world of innocence, but they’d been thrown into one where everything was rough, and bloody, and full of muck and mud and fire. Those who didn’t adapt were bodies, now. But Mr. Pevensie wasn’t a body. He was something else, something other that had been forged by the heavy blows of the rifle pounding back into his shoulder and tempered by long, horrid nights holding conversations with death as it whispered through the trenches, and that something didn’t know how to live in a soft world anymore. He wasn’t sure if he wanted that something to touch his children, or his wife, or anyone he loved.
So he withdrew, and most did not see the difference. They took his smiles and his polite nods as if he meant them, as if he were not something else wearing his skin, and his children still came near, even as his affection became more brief and stilted. More afraid.
Peter saw him when he raised his hand to Lucy’s shoulder to hug her, only to stop and let go again because of how fragile she felt, even in just one hand. When their eyes met, Mr. Pevensie stilled, for there was something deep and knowing in Peter’s glance, but of course Peter couldn’t know the truth. No one who hadn’t been to war should know what this was like. He nodded to him as if he understood why that look was in Peter’s eyes, and continued the rest of the evening as usual until Peter knocked on his study door.
“I wonder if I might talk to you for a moment, sir.”
Mr. Pevensie nearly flinched. Peter had always been formal and respectful, but before the war none of his children had knocked at an open door.
“Of course. Come, sit down and tell me what’s on your mind.”
Peter inclined his head and strode to his chair with a confidence that would have been fake with most children, but which settled round Peter’s shoulders like a well worn mantle. “I wanted to ask, how’ve you been?”
“Well enough.” Mr. Pevensie gave a curious smile, trying to act like he would have before, and ignoring the way his heart jumped as if he’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “What brought this on?”
Peter looked at him keenly for a few moments. “You’ve been tired,” he finally said slowly.
“It’s only work. Everyone must learn to live with a little weariness now and then. It's good of you to notice and take the time to check on me, but you mustn’t worry. Let’s talk about you, and what you’ve been getting into. Your Mother tells me you and your siblings have all been doing a lot of volunteer work.”
“Where we can. It reminds us of… of another time.”
“It is good to remember other times,” Mr. Pevensie said, perhaps more quietly than he meant to.
“It is.” Peter met his eyes solemnly. “I heard a story of… of another time, once. It was about a young king.”
“History or a fairy story?”
Peter’s lips twitched with some hidden amusement. “All fairy stories have a little truth in them, don’t they? I’d like to tell it to you.”
Mr. Pevensie glanced at the clock.
“It’s not a long story,” Peter said quickly, and Mr. Pevensie held back another flinch. Once he would have been delighted for one of his children to interrupt his work to discuss anything, even fairy stories, but it was not a reprieve now as it used to be, not when speaking to them was so difficult.
“I’d be glad to hear it,” Mr. Pevensie said, hoping that would make up for the mistake with the clock.
Peter did not look at him as he began, rather his eyes focused on some distant point beyond the wall, as if he could see the events he spoke of. “As I said, it was about a young king, one who was preparing for battle. His first battle. His only experiences with death then were fishing trips with his father, but that was soon to change. An enemy came to the encampment of the army he was to lead and tried to kill his sister. He ran to her aid, swiftly as his legs could carry him, and faced his enemy, though his heart turned to water within him at the gnashing teeth and flashing eyes. There he slew the one who would have hurt his dear one with a thrust of his sword, and the blood ran over his hand, thick and warm.” Peter’s glance strayed to his own hand, and he clenched it into a fist. “He had to clean his sword on the grass, and he cleaned his hand then too, but the blood stuck under his nails.”
Mr. Pevensie set his jaw. He remembered that, remembered how even when the hands weren’t red anymore, the nails were the hardest to clean once the blood had dried to them.
“It was the first person he killed, and afterward he was afraid, afraid of what he was capable of, afraid to touch the sister he had saved with bloody hands, but she was not afraid, at least, not of him. She was pale faced and shaking, but she fell into his arms before he had the chance to clean his sword, fell into them and clung to him, happy she was alive, grateful for what he had done.
“He did not know if he could do it again. That too, frightened him, for the battle was still to come, and he knew he would have to lead the charge in it. But, when the time came, he did kill again. In that battle, and in every battle thereafter. There were days it weighed on his mind, days he bore it in his sleep, or feared those he loved would come to scorn him for it, but they never did. They were grateful.” Peter looked up and met his father’s eyes for the first time since the story had begun. “They were grateful. And on the bad days, the times when he could see the blood in his waking hours, the laughter and love of his beloved ones would remind him what he protected, and that it had been right that he should do so .” He leaned forward and clasped his father’s hand tightly. “It didn’t feel right. It would never feel completely right. But without it that laughter and light and beauty would have been lost. The young king never forgot that first time, but he also never forgot who he saved by it, and never regretted a single moment that she lived.”
“That’s a very nice fairy story,” Mr. Pevensie murmured.
“With some truth in it,” Peter replied, squeezing his hand.
Mr. Pevensie blinked hard, but did not withdraw his hand as he had become so accustomed to doing, for in that moment he felt that somehow their hands were matched. Peter’s were still small in his man’s fist, even the callouses squishy and tender, but the clasp was solid, hard, like the clasp shared with other desperate men climbing from the dirty pit.
The moment passed, and Mr. Pevensie ached in a much different way than he had since coming home from the war, a way which wondered how his eldest child knew of such things, and if they could really be learned from fairy stories. Then Peter smiled, and asked him what he was working on, and the ache passed to the back of his mind as he reacquainted himself with the man his boy was becoming.