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“i want for us this, oh: that we are well.”
—“theseus”, the oh hellos
𓃬
Caspian wakes first, still exhausted, and not in his own chambers. Only one of these things is surprising.
He has been sharing Peter’s bed for some weeks now, since the departure of many of his people (and, scant hours later, Aslan himself) saw him sleeplessly wandering the ramparts, whereupon Peter spotted him from a window and ventured out to find him. Really, it’s not that Caspian can’t sleep in his own bed, mind. It’s just harder, now, lying awake and remembering a hand over his mouth, his heart in his throat—the racket of firing crossbows, the demolished bed; the curtains in tatters and his falcon skewered by an errant bolt.
In many ways, his room ceased to be his own that night. Caspian could change quarters, certainly—he is King, after all—but his parents’ empty suite is hardly better, and anyway, Peter had listened to his rambling admission of all this and more, and Peter had offered, and remembering him sprawled out beside Caspian on the riverbank, wet hair shining dark gold upon his brow, his lips ghosting the shell of Caspian’s ear the night after the coronation—Caspian said yes. So there really wasn’t a need.
They haven’t said anything to anyone about this new-formed thing between them in the intervening weeks, but no doubt the servants are already gossiping about his unused bed. (Last week, he overheard two lesser lords speculating that Susan had waylaid him with her charms in order to secure her family’s position in court, and that was why these curious upstarts were calling themselves Kings and Queens, for who ever heard of such things as magic horns anyway?) When he tells Peter as much, Peter laughs and sighs and assures him it’s just a matter of time before one of his sisters or brother wander in during the night anyway, and then the jig will be up, as he puts it.
(“Have you tried bolting your door?” Caspian asks, amused and a little baffled by this assertion. Even after so much time spent together, so much survived and learned, he can’t quite parse the sort of casual closeness the Kings and Queens possess. He supposes his ignorance in such matters comes from his growing up alone.
“No good,” Peter says, and then does something very clever to Caspian’s neck with teeth and tongue so as to leave Caspian gasping. “Trust me, that’ll just encourage them.”
Caspian is entirely too distracted to reply.)
Regardless, Peter seems more or less at peace with them knowing—less sometimes, more at others—thought he explained quietly, wincingly, late one night, tracing the line of Caspian’s hip in the moonlight, how things were different in that first place where he grew up, the one which marks him still in voice and word and, sometimes, in fear. That sometimes he forgets.
I am sorry, Caspian had whispered, and Peter whispered back, I just want you to know, if I’m—strange. It’s— it’s not you. It’ll pass, I think. And then he let Caspian hold him very quietly for a time, his fingers warm and trembling against Caspian’s lower back, and Caspian felt at once melancholic, and righteously angry, and overfull with something akin to joy.
All this is to say it has been pleasant, in a wholly inadequate word, sharing Peter’s bed, Peter’s counsel, Peter’s life. And if Caspian worries about anything to do with it, it’s the teasing they’re likely to receive once the others find out. (They can be quite relentless when they want to be.)
But today, he wakes later than expected to shafts of midmorning sunlight striping the coverlet of the bed—the curtains around it are always pulled back, something Peter did without Caspian asking, but that he’s grateful for all the same. Caspian blinks and sighs and rolls his tongue about his mouth. He feels a little slow and achy, which is not altogether unexpected; the encroaching end of summer brings near-nightly Narnian revels in anticipation of the harvest season. This will be the first proper harvest for Narnians in generations, and Caspian is not used to so much dancing, nor wine.
On the other side of the bed, there is an unmoving and vaguely person-shaped lump beneath the covers which he takes to be Peter, burrowed so deeply under the blankets one might assume it were winter. This is surprising, to say the least. Not the blankets—Peter, Caspian has learned, has a tendency to steal all the covers in his sleep. Rather, most days, Peter Pevensie is a most appallingly cheerful sort in the mornings, always up practically before dawn. Caspian swears more than half-heartedly that the sun keeps time by Peter, instead of the other way around.
Perhaps he is not so infallibly resilient to Narnian revels as he seems, Caspian decides. Rolling over, he prods at Peter’s shoulder, which elicits a faint noise of protest and a sort of burrowing deeper in response.
“Peter,” Caspian says.
No answer.
Caspian decides to change tactics.
Shaking his tangled hair out of his eyes, he crosses the bedroom and pulls all the drapes on Peter’s side of the bed (the left; he was very adamant about this, much to Caspian’s amusement) open so that sunlight floods the room in a wash of pale gold.
“Arise, Sir Sluggabed,” Caspian says, perching on the edge of the bed and tugging the covers away from Peter’s face.
Only now does Peter stir properly, flinging an arm over his eyes. Caspian has no idea how he managed to extricate it from his blanket cocoon, which seems otherwise impenetrably tangled and labyrinthine.
“Turn out the lights,” he groans.
“I’m afraid the sun is beyond my ability to command,” Caspian replies. Peter endeavors, rather sloppily, to take the blankets back. He frowns. “Are you all right? How much wine did you have last night?”
Peter glares half-heartedly out from under his crooked arm, squinting with his entire face against the morning light.
“Less than you,” he rasps, “because you got carried away with the Dwarves like I told you not to, and then Your Majesty saw fit to throw up nothing but lager twice on the walk back.”
“Oh,” says Caspian, recalling this with a wince, “yes. I suppose I did.”
Peter does not reply, instead groping for a pillow to cover his head.
“Are you quite all right?” Caspian asks again, because he does not look it.
“I will be,” comes the reply, muffled in goose down, “if you’d close the blasted curtains.”
And all at once, it clicks.
“It’s your head, isn’t it,” Caspian realizes. When Peter lowers the pillow to look at him, he can’t help but to reach out and push a tangled lock of hair off Peter’s forehead, tracing a thumb along his brow and feeling with great surprise all the tension furrowed there.
Peter has not had one of the pained spells he mentioned to Caspian since recovering from the duel with Caspian’s uncle, and he had all but forgotten the matter in the bustle of rebuilding and restructuring and rounding up petty rebellions across the land.
Peter sighs, sounding resigned, though he leans ever so slightly into Caspian’s touch, closing his eyes.
“It’ll pass,” he says, which is as close as Peter Pevensie usually gets to admitting he’s in pain. “It always does.”
But that does not at all solve the problem that it is now.
𓃬
Caspian asks, crossing the room once again to draw the curtains and return the room to cool-shrouded dimness, “Is there anything I can bring you that will help?”
“Nothing really does. Just time.”
“Then take it as you need,” Caspian replies. He returns to the bedside, where Peter has curled on his side with his face tucked into one of the pillows. His brow is still creased with pain, but perhaps a little less without all the light. Squeezing the hand that rests atop the covers briefly, he says, “I will leave you be.”
But when he moves to step away, suddenly there are fingers on his own, and he looks down to see Peter grasping at his hand.
“You can stay,” he murmurs. The room is too dark to tell if he’s avoiding Caspian’s eye or simply cannot find it in the dimness. “If you want.”
There are reasons Caspian should not, and they both know this. There are things he should do. Needs to, even. Kingship has its demands, and they are many.
He settles back onto the bed anyway, even if it’s only for a little while, because he is beginning to understand in bits and pieces the ways in which Peter opens himself up, one slow and arduous step at a time. This is one such step, and Caspian is loath to leave it unanswered. And he can’t bring himself to regret it, really—not when Peter rolls over to rest his temple against Caspian’s hip and sighs, very quietly, in the dark.
𓃬
It is difficult to keep hold of any sense of time in the dimly silent room, but Caspian thinks it has been perhaps even longer than he expected to be missed—though not so long as he might have hoped, even after a late summer revel which kept them all out ‘til dawn—before someone comes looking. Peter is the first to bring anything of the sort up.
“You ought to eat,” he mumbles into Caspian’s shirt at length, breath warm through the linen.
“So should you,” Caspian replies, carding his fingers through Peter’s hair. “I thought you were asleep.”
Peter hums faintly, more vibration than sound. “Been trying. Can’t. That’s rather nice, though.” (This, as Caspian slides a hand through his hair once more.)
When Caspian pulls his hand away and swings his legs over the edge of the bed, however, he cracks open one eye, gleaming in the dim light, and frowns, looking rather put out.
“I’m only going to fetch you something from the kitchens,” Caspian tells him.
Peter huffs. “I’d rather you not.”
“You’re very clingy, did you know?” he can’t help teasing.
“I am not,” Peter grumbles. “And I really don’t want anything. You needn’t bother about me.”
But Caspian is always going to bother about him, as a matter of course.
“You need something,” Caspian insists, though quietly. “Water. Broth, perhaps.”
Peter says nothing.
“Please.”
A sigh, which means Caspian has won this round—which is good, though the lack of fight put up is almost concerning, given Peter’s stubborn inclinations. He must be in more pain than he’s letting on, and isn’t that just like him?
(Caspian had asked him, once, as they rode from the castle towards Beaversdam, what one of his spells, as the others call them, are like.
Peter’s mouth twisted to one side for a moment of thought. “Well, I don’t know. Have you ever been kicked in the head by a horse?”
“No.” Destrier had tread on his foot quite often, but that’s another matter entirely.
“Spar with some Centaurs,” Peter advised him, “and it’ll happen sooner or later.” He sighed. “Poor example, I suppose. What about been shot by arrows? I mean properly hit, mind you. Through something.”
“I’ve been shot at,” Caspian said, grimacing at the memory.
Peter laughed, then, head thrown back but hands steady on the reins of his horse, and Caspian found himself mesmerized (not for the first time) by the line of his neck, the sunlight against his jaw.
“Then I’ve run out of comparisons,” he said, “but if you can imagine it, it’s rather like having a giant squeezing your head in his hand after being kicked by a horse, or sometimes like Susan’s put a full quiver through my temple.”
Caspian’s face at this proclamation must have been a sight, for Peter slowed his horse and said, bracingly, “It’s not so bad, really.” (As though Caspian were the one who was worse off, and needed reassuring.) “And anyway, I’m used to them by now.”
Now he thinks that Peter does not behave as any man who has been kicked or shot or grappled by a giant might. Peter, though, is not an ordinary man, and when Caspian thinks back on how he took his pain in both hands like a horse or a sword and wielded it during his duel against Miraz until he could hold it off no longer by the river, he thinks it is likely this is how Peter would behave should any of those things happen to him just now.
It is his way, or perhaps his instinct, to hide his pain.)
He touches Peter’s wrist, briefly, where it lies atop the covers. “I’ll only be a moment.”
Peter only nods faintly in answer.
𓃬
When Caspian opens the door, it is to find Susan in the hall with her fist half-raised to knock. For a moment, they regard one another, and as she takes the situation in—Peter’s chambers, but Caspian undeniably here, and in his nightclothes despite the hour—her eyebrows arch up towards her hair.
There is a moment of entirely awkward silence, and then—
“Well,” says Susan briskly, “good. Does this mean you two are done dancing around like a couple of Fauns in high summer?”
Caspian clears his throat, opens his mouth—then, thinking better of it, closes it again. Susan merely looks at him. One brow twitches impossibly higher. He can feel a flush creeping hotly up the back of his neck.
“Yes?” he manages.
“Good answer.” She clasps her hands together and rocks back on her heels. “Now, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s rather late. The two of you might want to think about joining the rest of us in running the kingdom at some point today.”
At this, Caspian finally steps fully into the hall and draws the door shut behind him. “I am aware of the hour,” he replies, apologetic though not entirely regretful, “as is your brother. Only I’m afraid he’s indisposed this morning.”
Susan’s face does something rather complicated, and Caspian coughs, cheeks flaming.
He clarifies, uncomfortably, “His head.”
“Oh,” says Susan, and they both look at one another and then away in mutual agreement not to speak of it.
She draws herself up all at once and nods, and suddenly she’s entirely business again, cool and collected in a way Caspian continuously envies. Susan Pevensie is regal and courtly and clever in all the ways he never quite managed.
She asks, “How long?”
“Some time,” Caspian answers. “I woke—perhaps an hour ago? Since before that, I would think.”
“And I suppose he’ll fuss about the need if we try cordial,” she says, more to herself than to Caspian, and sighs.
“I was going to fetch something from the kitchens,” Caspian informs her, “though I suppose you will know better than I what would be best. Broth, perhaps?”
“And water.” Susan nods. “It’s hard enough getting those in him, so I wouldn’t bother with anything else. We’ve certainly never managed it.” She looks him up and down again and the corners of her mouth twist hesitantly towards amusement. “Perhaps you’d better get dressed while I go and get that for him. It wouldn’t do for anyone to catch you wandering the halls in your pyjamas at this hour.”
There is little use, Caspian has learned, in arguing with Queen Susan’s judgement, especially on matters concerning propriety, people, and her siblings. In a sense, this involves all three. Thus, he merely nods and goes back into the rooms to dress.
Once he is finished with his task, he perches on the edge of the bed to wait.
“Forget something?” Peter mumbles curiously, muffled by the pillow he’s shoved his face into in the absence of Caspian’s side.
“Susan’s gone instead. I thought it best not to argue.”
“Ah,” says Peter, but nothing else. He sounds rather too tired to care. Instead, he rolls over and reaches out an arm to hook around Caspian’s waist, tugging him closer so he can rest his cheek on Caspian’s thigh.
“Clingy,” Caspian tells him, smiling faintly.
“Not,” Peter replies, not opening his eyes. He doesn’t sound like he means it.
Once again sliding his fingers into the hair at the nape of Peter’s neck, Caspian closes his own eyes and settles back against the headboard to wait.
𓃬
He wakes quite suddenly with the disorienting realization that he doesn’t remember falling asleep in the first place. The room is no longer empty—Susan is setting a tray down beside the bed, and Lucy stands at the edge of it, apparently in the middle of poking Caspian in the ribs until he wakes.
“Good morning, sleepyhead,” she giggles.
“I wasn’t—” he begins. She pokes him again.
“Yes, you were. Tell him, Peter.”
“You were snoring,” Peter murmurs, head still pillowed on Caspian’s lap.
“We were out until dawn,” Caspian sighs.
“Yes, and you’ve slept half the day away by this point,” adds Susan, busying herself with a cloth and a bowl of water. “But you needn’t worry. Edmund’s meeting with the Dwarves about those quarries to the north, and the Centaurs called off their hearing until they can observe the position of next week’s stars, so you haven’t been too sorely missed.”
Accepting the tumbler of water she hands him, Caspian says, rather chagrined, “Thank you.”
Susan raises one eyebrow, though only a little. “Just don’t make a habit of it.” Then, with a nod towards the water as Caspian is attempting to pry Peter (one-handed, and unsuccessfully) into a somewhat upright position from which to drink: “That one’s for you, you know.”
Caspian says, startled, “Oh.”
Before he can fully process that particular bit of information, Susan has leaned over him and hauled Peter up and back against the pillows with more strength than her slender statue belies.
“Drink,” she tells him firmly, pressing water into his hands and gesturing at Lucy for something—the cloth from before, now damp, it seems—“or I’ll set Caspian on you.”
Caspian blinks, bemused.
“What’s he supposed to do that you won’t?” Peter wonders, but he takes the water and the cloth without complaint, pressing the latter against his eyes.
“He’ll figure something out,” Susan says in a tone that makes Caspian choke on his water. Lucy bites down on her sleeve to muffle her laughter, though it only helps a little.
For a time, the room is quietly warm and companionable, full of soft whispers and water and cool compresses in the dark. At Caspian’s side, a little of the tension coiling through Peter’s limbs seems to slip away. It’s rather nice, Caspian thinks, sitting quietly with the three of them like this.
But as all things do it comes to an end. Susan excuses herself on account of a meeting with merchants arriving from Galma, and as she’s tidying the tray to leave, Caspian feels Peter shift against his side.
“You should go,” he says softly into Caspian’s ear. “It will show the merchants we respect their offer of negotiations. Open friendly trade opportunities in the future. That sort of thing.”
Caspian knows all this very well—indeed, there is nothing patronizing in Peter’s tone, and certainly not his lips against Caspian’s neck—but still, he finds himself wishing he could stay. The thing about Peter Pevensie is that he is nothing short of distracting, though this way is perhaps not the most pleasant for all parties involved.
“I’ll be all right,” Peter adds, very softly—it is unclear if it’s for Caspian’s sake or his, that—when Caspian hesitates still. “Lucy’ll keep me in line, won’t you, Lu?”
From her position sprawled over both their legs, Lucy pipes up, “Oh, yes.” Then, rather petulantly enough to make an outsider think she really is nothing more than a girl of nine years, she adds, “I’ve got my cordial right here in my pocket, you know, if you’d only take some—”
“No,” Peter says, forcefully enough that he winces and reaches up to rub at his temples.
Lucy only sighs loudly and exchanges a look with Caspian.
“I see you two,” Peter says, falling back across the pillows and smacking at Caspian’s shoulder, though with no real force behind it. Very pointedly, he adds, “Stop scheming and go to your trade meeting, Your Majesty.”
“Very well,” Caspian assents, capturing the offending hand and pressing a brief kiss to the knuckles, so that Peter reddens and Lucy snickers, “Your Majesty.”
“Ridiculous,” Peter mutters into the pillow, but he sounds rather fond.
𓃬
(On their way down the hall, Caspian coughs quietly, trying to decide the best way to broach the question he wishes to ask. Susan glances over at him, eyebrows raised, waiting.
“Before,” Caspian begins, rather awkwardly, “what you said about—Peter and myself. Dancing around, as you put it.”
Susan purses her lips. “Yes?”
“You knew?”
“Oh, dear,” says Susan, and stops so she can lay a hand on his arm and look him full in the face, her own expression caught somewhere between sympathetic and amused. “Caspian, I’m sorry to tell you this, but there’s probably not a Narnian who doesn’t.”
“But how?” He’d thought they’d been at least somewhat subtle about it.
Susan bites down on a smile. “Our first day. Peter laughed at something Trufflehunter said to him in the wood and you practically walked into a tree. Even the Bears knew.”
After that, it takes the rest of their walk to the chambers where they are receiving the Galmians for Caspian’s cheeks to stop their flaming.)
𓃬
The meeting with the Galmians is long, tedious, and ultimately rewarding, so it is with a tired sort of victory that Caspian makes his way (with Susan and Edmund along as well) back to Peter’s chambers. Only—he’s not so sure they’re just Peter’s chambers, now. Perhaps it would be better if they all acknowledged that.
On their way up a staircase, a look passes between the siblings, after which Susan lifts her gathered skirts a little higher and climbs ahead while Edmund falls back and into step with Caspian.
“About this business with my brother,” he says, and Caspian cannot help but tense. It is only a little, but Edmund notices and lifts an eyebrow all the same. “What, you don’t think I disapprove, do you?”
Caspian tries to parse the best answer to that, but it seems he is too long in his parsing.
“By the Lion,” Edmund sighs. “You’re as bad as he is, you know that? I only wanted to say be good to him. I know you will be, but I could hardly call myself a proper brother without mentioning it at least once, you know.” He nudges Caspian’s ribs with a good-natured elbow. “You’re doing a fine job so far, it seems. You’re certainly good for him, at any rate.”
They are out of the stairwell now, and striding unobstructed down the hall, so there is nothing to keep Caspian from turning to glance at Edmund as they walk. Edmund catches this look. Holds it. He must see something in Caspian’s face, because he stops, pulling Caspian to a halt of his own.
Frowning, Edmund says, “You don’t believe me. No, don’t argue. I can tell. Well, it’s true. Do you want to guess what Peter usually does when he’s got one of these headaches?”
He doesn’t give Caspian a chance to answer.
“He tries to push through them every time, like an idiot. He’s bullheaded enough to put any self-respecting Minotaur to shame. Judging by what Susan told me, this one’s worse than usual, but I bet you anything if we’d come to wake him, ten to one he’d’ve pled hungover and tried to get by anyway.”
“I see,” says Caspian.
“You don’t,” corrects Edmund. “I’m saying it’s different with you.” His eyes slide off to the side, going a little distant in that way all the Pevensies’ do at one time or another when they remember their days ruling Narnia so long ago. “Sometimes, we know him too well, I think. We just got used to him being like this, back before—when Lucy and I were too young to push back so much, and Susan just wanted to keep the peace. We were all kids, I guess, and he—” Edmund sighs. “It doesn’t really matter.”
Caspian says, “I understand, I think.”
“Do you?” Edmund’s gaze is keen.
“I would like to look after him as well,” Caspian replies, “if he will let me. And perhaps even if he will not.”
Something rather like a smile lifts one corner of Edmund’s usually inflexible mouth. “Good man.”
They rejoin Susan further down the hall and make the rest of their way to Peter’s rooms in amiable silence. When they arrive, it’s to Lucy poking her head out of the door.
“Still bad,” she says by way of greeting, “but not as bad. And of course he won’t take any cordial.”
“Just put it in his water like you used to,” Edmund suggests. “Or use your knife. You’ve done it before.”
An argument—good-natured, no doubt, though their definition of such has always confounded Caspian—breaks out as to why, exactly, this would be an unsuccessful tactic. It will work itself out, one way or another, though both ways will probably involve playful wrestling and teeth, if his experience with how Lucy and Edmund like to argue is anything to go by. In the meantime, Caspian slips through the door standing open behind Lucy and into the quiet darkness of the bedroom.
He thinks Peter is asleep, but he stirs when Caspian sheds his boots and belt and slides into the bed, turning to rest his cheek on the arm Caspian slips carefully under his head.
“How are you feeling?” he whispers.
“More horse than giant, now,” Peter whispers back. “The meeting?”
Caspian can’t help grinning. “A success, of course.”
There comes a soft sigh, the warm breath of it slipping across his neck. “Good. I thought as much.”
They lie in silence for a moment or two while Caspian considers what he wants to say; how best to say it.
“Peter.”
“Mm?”
“Will you promise me something?”
“I s’pose that depends on the promise,” Peter murmurs, “doesn’t it?”
Caspian reaches up to sweep stray hairs off his brow, thumb the line of his jaw. “If you still feel this way on the morrow, take a drop of cordial. For everyone’s peace of mind.” Peter makes a noise, not entirely of protest but something like it, and Caspian quickly adds, “And for the good of Narnia. It needs you.”
He does not say, I need you. The sentiment remains.
There is a long silence, wherein the only noise is their soft breathing and the muffled conversation carrying merrily on in the hall. Caspian chews the inside of his cheek, tastes blood.
Finally, Peter sighs.
“All right,” he murmurs. “I promise. But not before tomorrow. It’ll probably be gone by then anyway.”
Caspian can live with that.
Letting out a breath of his own, he rests his forehead against Peter’s and thinks that it’s a start.