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“but this is the moment just after the miracle. the crowd has dispersed. lazarus goes home, resumes his job. his eyes adjust to the light. his depression returns. years pass, and he’s dying a second time. it’s as hard as before: he feels cold, he feels lonely. but there are no tv cameras this time, there’s no newspaper notice and there’s no coming back.”
—blind spot, teju cole
🜲
The first fight Peter starts after getting back from Narnia, Edmund finishes.
Peter hates this for a lot of reasons, not the least of which being it makes it practically impossible for him to avoid thinking about how wrong his body still feels—how it remembers, somehow, all the old pains and scars and twinges, the ghost of every wound he’s suffered come back to haunt him when he lies in bed at night, but none of its strength, speed, stamina.
Because Peter was losing, is the thing, and losing badly, and it would have been much worse if Edmund hadn’t stepped in.
It shouldn’t matter. Peter shouldn’t have even started the damn thing, and he knows that, except these days he feels like one of Lucy’s old jigsaw puzzles someone’s put a foot through—scattered all his important bits across the floor—and Peter can’t quite remember how he was before, or at least not enough to start putting himself back together again. Jigsaw puzzles are another thing he didn’t remember until now. Feeling helpless, too.
What Peter Pevensie remembers is this: skin on bone on skin; blood on his knuckles, behind his teeth; pain in his ribs—but not much else. Not much else at all.
“I expect better of you,” their mother tells him, voice low and tremulous, at the kitchen table when the others have gone to bed. She sits tense and quiet on the edge of her chair, as though she expects to have to run from him. As though she is afraid. Her eyes are red, thumbnail bleeding where she worried it to distraction, like Edmund always does.
With a start, Peter realizes that must be where he got it. He’d forgotten. They all had.
“Do you have anything to say for yourself?” she asks at the end of her lecture about how he must be careful about what sort of example he sets, must stay mindful of what he gets Edmund into, must remember that his actions have consequences. Must be a better brother.
And Peter says, softly, “No,” because he expected better, too.
But a year passes, and it seems they’re both in for a disappointment.
🜲
By the time they stumbled back through the wardrobe to sprawl on the floor of the Professor’s upstairs spare room, Peter hadn’t dreamt of the Stone Table in years. Before that, it wasn’t even often. But something about being back, being young again, looking in the mirror and seeing not the face of a King he’s grown used to being, but the face of a boy who went away to die, brings it back to him with a vengeance fit for the Witch herself. He sleeps fitfully, screams himself awake scrabbling at his chest that remembers a wound, remembers the knife that made it. It’s never there—never scarred, even in Narnia—but now Susan has to mend the torn-off buttons on his pyjama shirts weekly. Now his chest is a map of bloody scratches left by his own desperate nails, seeking to dig out the thing that hurt him. The thing that hurts him still.
At school, Peter sleeps with a corner of the sheet stuffed into his mouth, jaw clamped tightly to keep the screams down when they come.
And they never do stop coming.
🜲
“You need to stop doing this,” Susan begs him, shuffling him into a corner of the platform to check for anything worse than bruises once the last of the crowd has dispersed. He hisses when she prods at a tender spot, the scent of metal and burning and damp still thick in his nostrils from when one prick or another shoved his head down over the tracks. Her brows are knit with as much annoyance as worry. “You’re going to get yourself hurt.”
“It’s a bit late for that,” Peter mutters sardonically, because there’s been a pain in his chest and an ache in his stomach, his throat, the corners of his eyes since long before this petty brawl in the Underground.
Because it’s been a year since Peter Pevensie felt anything close to whole, and longer since he didn’t hurt.
Susan’s mouth twists in displeasure. Flipping her hair over her shoulder, she snaps, “Fine. How’s this? You’re going to get Edmund hurt.”
That shuts him up.
He hates how right she is. He hates it here, too. Hates who he is here.
But he doesn’t know how to fix it. He wouldn’t even know where to start.
🜲
“Don’t you ever get tired of being treated like a kid?” Peter asks, wondering why no one seems to understand, not even them. Wondering how it got to be that he feels like he’s pleading with them, one step short of going down to his knees, when they used to listen to everything he said.
Of course, that was back when Peter was someone worth listening to.
“We are kids,” Edmund scoffs.
But Peter hasn’t been one in a very long time, even before he grew older in Narnia. The boy he used to be died beneath the Witch’s knife. The King died when he fell headfirst out of Narnia, landing on smarting knees in a dusty upstairs room.
What’s left after that? Who?
🜲
(They’re pulled back into Narnia, a thousand unseen hands tugging at their hair, wrists, hearts—and suddenly Peter’s not the only one asking those questions. Suddenly, that’s the least of their fears.)
🜲
“What is this place?” Lucy inquires as Peter stares at a crude etching of, he thinks, himself, all of fifteen years old, wielding his sword against the Wolf. His hands now aren’t so different as they were then; they still shake just the same.
When he looks up, he finds Prince Caspian’s gaze heavy on his own, his eyes dark and a little bit surprised.
Caspian asks, sounding surprised, “You don’t know?”
Peter wants to tell him they haven’t got all the answers, nor even most of them, wants to point out the gap of tens of generations between their leaving and coming back—all the ways in which Narnia has changed. But he can’t quite force the words out of his throat past the way it closes off every time Caspian looks at him like that, appraising and thoughtful and perhaps a little hungry; every time the light catches and caresses the curve of his cheek.
In the end, he says nothing at all, and Caspian leads them deeper into the How, into a massive and echoing space as black as a dreamless sleep. Then he lights a long trough of oil that runs the perimeter of the room, revealing to them the very heart of Aslan’s How and what it is that lies there, and Peter’s throat clamps shut for an entirely different reason.
Peter has not been back to the Stone Table since he stumbled off it that morning, shaky and colt-legged, bloodied like a second birth with a sword in one hand and Lucy supporting him by the other. He has not seen the hilltop since they surged away from it, bent low over Aslan’s back, both their hands streaked with Peter’s own drying blood.
He remembers it, though; every edge, every line carved into his memory from a thousand fevered dreams. The grit of it against his back. The chill through all his clothes.
What he finds at the heart of the How is this: unlike the rest of Narnia, and unlike Peter himself, the Stone Table is unchanged.
He feels more than hears Edmund’s sharp inhalation behind him as he stares at it, tries to make sense of being here again after so long. Even for Peter, it’s been years. A lifetime. The phantom pain in his chest redoubles, returns.
“Peter,” murmurs Susan, and suddenly she’s taking the torch from his hand.
Lucy reaches for his other, but Peter pulls away, walking forward until he’s standing close enough that he can see every curve of the runes carved knuckle-deep along the edge of the Table. The stone from the center outwards, fading towards the edges, is rendered darker than the rest, stained from countless sacrifices. Perhaps some of them were even after Peter. After he left. It’s only noticeable in the dimness if you know where to look, half-hidden in the shadowed split down the middle, the roughness and dust layered thick upon the surface. But if anyone knows it’s there, it’s Peter. Some of that stain is his own heart’s-blood, after all.
He places his hands upon the edge, carefully, as though it might bite him, and he is surprised to find it cold, like any other stone. It seems like it should be warm, alive, beating, buried here in the belly of the earth, the How raised over it like a great beast that crouches low in the field so near to where Peter made his first kill. Narnia has always run on blood, one way or another. That was one. This was another.
Peter’s fingers tremble upon the stone as he wonders how much more blood will be spilled to win his home back, to claw it from the hands of those who have stolen it away. If that’s something they can do.
Suddenly Lucy is beside him, slipping her arm round his waist, resting her head against his ribs. She was smaller the last time they were here.
So was Peter.
“He must know what he’s doing,” she whispers.
But if Aslan does, then he’s the only one.
🜲
To tell the truth, Peter has never handled loss—or much of anything—with the same grace as Susan, or even Edmund, who grew out of his tendency to be a sore loser around the same time they began to understand all they had been given to protect or to lose. It’s a skill one can learn more than something one is born possessing (though sometimes he swears Susan was born a diplomat to make up for all the ways Peter’s not) and Peter spent a fair amount of his life honing it, wielding it where swords might fail.
But after a scraped-raw year in England, after being ripped out of the right body, right world, right time, Peter is a blunted blade, smashing his way through everything and leaving only destruction in his wake. Their attempt on the Telmarine castle is proof enough of this. Of Peter’s failings. Peter’s faults.
It doesn’t help that Edmund flung himself down a roof and could’ve broken both his legs or been shot through with a dozen bolts from the waiting Telmarine soldiers, all because none of Peter’s siblings have quite forgotten out of all of them, he’s the one who came closer to death than any of them—breathed the very air of Aslan’s country for a moment—and pay more attention to his welfare in a battle than they ever pay themselves.
He thought they’d gotten better about it; trusted him to take care of himself, to hold his own. But screaming Edmund’s name from the ground and realizing he was too far, too far, too far to do a damn thing if something happened, watching his brother’s eyes go wide enough Peter could make out the whites in the moonlight, made it excruciatingly plain that his brother hadn’t bothered to look before he leapt, and all because of Peter. That Susan was right, back in London. That he’s going to get Edmund hurt.
And that was before he got countless Narnians killed. Before he had to turn his back on them, abandon them a second time.
All this is to say Peter is not exactly in what most would call his right mind, stumbling back to the How after dawn with eyes burning from more than just a lack of sleep. If he were, he might not have said what he says to Caspian, not even the true parts. But Peter is exhausted, and Peter feels worn thin by anger, by grief, by a year out of life and body, and Peter wants someone to blame as much as anyone else. Or maybe he just wants something as simple as a sword leveled in his direction, because swords are easy to understand. Caspian is, too.
Peter should’ve known better, of the two of them. He shouldn’t have trusted Caspian, shouldn’t have let him go off-script, should’ve been more careful, should’ve learned how to tell him no—always should, never did. He’s not sure if he’s angrier at himself or at Caspian or even at Susan for taking the other’s side just to try to keep them from arguing and calling attention to themselves, but none of that matters when they realize what’s going on.
Because when Peter bursts into the heart of the How beside Edmund and sees Caspian silhouetted small and dark in the frostbitten light, sees the sparkling circle netting his feet, sees (worst of all) the Witch looming over him, his nightmares come back to life, he doesn’t so much think as roar, somewhere deep down inside, that the Witch will not take anything more—not from Narnia, and not from Peter.
Edmund takes the werewolf. Peter handles the hag. There’s a terrible moment in the scuffle, a confusion of sound and fury and snarls and swords, when she twists his wrist, sends Rhindon skittering away across the floor, and the chill worsens as the Witch leans out further, stretching, reaching, intent on Caspian, who still hasn’t moved but for his hand dripping blood onto the stone. There’s a foot between their fingers. Less.
Peter moves.
“Get away from him!” he snarls, snatching up his sword, slashing away the hag, shoving Caspian bodily from the Witch, so hard he stumbles and goes down upon the floor. Peter’s so intent on separating them he doesn’t realize what he’s done until it’s too late. The Witch is there before him, rearing back at first, but then—
Her smile. Her eyes, blown wide. And Peter remembers torches, jeering; Ginarrbrik, laughing. Remembers her lips on his brow, his blood on her tongue. The knife in her hand—falling.
“You are always coming to the rescue, aren’t you, Peter dear?” She laughs, light and friendly and horribly chilling. Something ices over in Peter’s gut watching her fingers caress the barrier between them, then slowly worm their way back through into open air. “I only need a drop this time, little king. Just one. You gave it so freely before.”
It takes more effort than it should to point Rhindon toward her hand, to find the will to shake his head. It’s not the only thing about Peter that’s shaking.
“You know,” she tells him sweetly, condescendingly, rightly, “you can’t do this alone.”
And it’s the Witch, so he shouldn’t believe a word she says, but she’s not wrong. Not about this. Deep inside Peter there is a tangle-rooted fear whispering, You are going to get them killed. Perhaps she has seen it in his eyes, that fear. Perhaps that is why she still stretches toward him, reaching for the cut upon his brow.
He jerks away from those long white fingers, reeling back to catch himself on the edge of the Stone Table. Suddenly it feels like the only solid thing in the world, more real than even Peter himself.
Rhindon clatters to the floor as he tries to remember how to breathe.
“Just one drop,” the Witch entices.
“No,” Peter rasps. “No.”
Then, just as his vision’s going white with terror, just as the spell is wrapping snaking tendrils around his unwilling feet, just as Caspian is pulling himself dazedly up to his knees—then is when Edmund’s blade bursts through the Witch’s stomach. She looks down at it, seeming surprised, almost, before looking back up at Peter. Her mouth opens—
And the wall of ice shatters, shards exploding across the room like the falls of the Great River so long ago. One catches Peter across the cheek, cutting him to the bone, blood sheeting down his jaw, but he’s too busy hunching in on himself to notice, grasping with trembling fingers at his chest, which burns like fire. No. Like ice.
“Peter!” Lucy scrambles around the Stone Table to his side, Susan following, throwing down her bow and reaching to catch Peter as his knees give out.
But it’s Edmund whose wrist Peter reaches for when he comes tumbling and skittering across the broken slough of ice, sword still in hand. Edmund, whose last tangle with the Witch did not end so kindly. To the side, Caspian is standing, now, staring in confusion or perhaps concern, but Peter can’t bring himself to care.
“She’s gone, Pete,” Edmund tells him, gripping his wrists back just as tightly. “She’s gone. We’re okay.”
But he isn’t. He isn’t.
Turning away from Susan’s bitten lip and Caspian’s stricken face, Peter hides his own in his brother’s shoulder and tries to remember how to breathe.
It takes a very, very long time. The Witch, it seems, has not yet taken all she can from Peter.
🜲
They’re in the middle of a war, of course, so things must carry on. After Peter can breathe properly again but before his hands have stopped their shaking, he pulls himself back to his feet and gathers up his sword.
“We don’t have time for this,” he says, holding up a hand when Susan tries to protest. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not,” Edmund replies bluntly, though he doesn’t try to stop Peter when he moves toward the passageway back into the rest of the How.
Peter swallows. His wrist still aches from the hag’s cruel grip, and his head pounds in tandem with every step. He only let Lucy use cordial for the slice on his cheek, and the rest of him is peppered with a myriad of cuts and bruises from the raid and what came after. He says, quietly, “I will be.”
Their faces say they don’t believe him.
He can’t blame them. Peter’s not even sure he believes himself.
🜲
All told, he sort of expects Caspian is going to ask about it—all of it—sooner or later, so Peter’s not particularly surprised when he hears footsteps in the passageway and opens his eyes to see Caspian standing over him, looking down at him as though Peter’s a riddle he just can’t unravel. It’s the same look he gave him when Peter said he would be the one challenging Miraz to a duel for the throne, not Caspian.
“Caspian,” he acknowledges, and it comes out softer than he intends.
“What are you doing?” Caspian asks, and there is a queer sort of apprehension in his tone that reminds Peter how much Narnia has changed since he ruled it. How little people remember, even now, even here—and how much they fear.
Peter isn’t really doing anything, is the thing, only lying atop the Stone Table, hands fisted atop his stomach and chin tipped back. It’s the only spot in the entire room where he can’t see Aslan’s stony face, and he thinks there’s probably a metaphor in there somewhere, but he’s always been rubbish at that sort of thing.
In truth, he’s been avoiding this room and the Table both since Caspian first showed it to them, at least as much as he can. But he wanted to be alone, after everything, and this is the only room where he can be, and this is the only way he won’t have to look at Aslan and imagine how disappointed he must be, so Peter is lying atop the Stone Table for the second time in his life and now he’s not even alone with or for his troubles.
Oddly enough, he finds he doesn’t mind that too terribly. Caspian’s—well. Caspian is a lot of things, and despite himself, despite his actions, Peter doesn’t really think they’re all bad, or even mostly. Caspian is also currently standing over Peter, head tilted a little, curiosity warring with uncertainty on his face in the firelight. There is a lock of dark hair falling into darker eyes, and Peter very carefully does not think about reaching up for it, or pushing it out of his face.
“I died here, you know,” he says conversationally instead, as though the feeling of the stone beneath him isn’t one that comes back to him in dreams every night of his life. “Once.”
Most people only die once in their lives. By Narnian standards, Peter Pevensie has died twice—once for Narnia, for Edmund, atop this very Table. And then he died to it, passing out of Narnia and into legend and England both. What does that make him now but a ghost from the past, and one who perhaps should have stayed there?
Caspian seems startled by this proclamation, brows drawing together as he considers it. “What do you mean?”
“Do your stories not mention that?” Peter asks, and it comes out more embittered than he means it to.
“Stories have many versions,” Caspian says. “I do not know if I have been told this one.”
Peter says, turning his head so as not to look at him, “It’s not really all mine to tell. Not entirely.”
“So tell me the parts that are yours.”
“The Witch wanted blood.” He shrugs. Still can’t quite look at Caspian, who was certainly near enough to hear what she said to him before. “I let her have mine. It didn’t stick, though.”
“Why?”
“Oh, Aslan, and Deep Magic, and Deeper Magic no one ever really explained. I don’t know. I just know one moment I’ve got a knife through my chest and the next I was—fine.”
Fine, he thinks, is certainly one word for it. Though it’s not exactly the end of the story, there’s not much else to tell, nothing that isn’t already carved into the walls of the How and written in Caspian’s professor’s history books, he imagines. He’s never talked about what happened so plainly before. It’s—freeing, perhaps. A weight off his shoulders, his chest. He releases a long breath and thinks that’s the end of it. He’s wrong.
Caspian says, “That’s not what I meant.”
“What?”
“Not why didn’t it last,” Caspian says. “Not why aren’t you still dead.”
Peter frowns up at him, finally, confused. “Then why what?”
“Why did you let the Witch have you? Your blood?”
The question lands like a touch on a particularly tender bruise, and Peter can’t help sucking in a quiet breath at the sting of it. He swallows thickly. Closes his eyes so he won’t have to see Caspian’s expression, or worse, the line of his neck in the torchlight.
He says, very softly, “So she wouldn’t take Edmund’s.”
A beat. Then:
“Oh,” breathes Caspian.
“Yes,” says Peter, eyes still closed. “Oh.”
There is a moment, then, where the only sound is the crackling of the fire, and the distant, hushed echoes of the rest of their ragtag army, trickling down to them through the twisting passageways of the How. Peter notices, dimly, that he’s taller than he must have been before. Last time, he felt so small and childish atop the Table when he was bound at the Witch’s feet, when he lay in the new-formed crack with his sister’s arms around his neck. He still feels childish, at least in the sense that he seems so far from the man he used to be, but he doesn’t quite fit anymore. His heel hangs off one end of the Table, while the crown of his head just touches the other. It’s so close to where Caspian stands he can almost feel the other boy’s warmth against his scalp.
“Peter,” begins Caspian suddenly, and the barest touch of fingertips on Peter’s shoulder startles him into opening his eyes, gazing back up at Caspian’s strangely determined face. “May I ask another question?”
“You already have,” Peter says, if only because he has found himself unexpectedly afraid of the way Caspian looks at him. This comment hardly earns him a frown, and that scares him, too.
“Why are you fighting my uncle?”
Peter blinks. “To buy time. You said—”
“I said he would be honor-bound to consider challenges to his throne,” Caspian cuts him off. “I never said it should be you who fought him. Miraz is my kin. My people. My problem. I ask you again: why are you fighting him?” When Peter says nothing, he adds, softer, rougher: “He could kill you.”
And Peter could lie. Of course he could lie. But he has been lying in one way or another ever since he got here; ever since they stumbled out of the wardrobe missing their crowns and scars and years well-earned; perhaps ever since he was born. Just once, before he dies (for a second or third time, depending on how you count it) and it’s certainly beginning to look like he might—just once, he’d like to tell the truth.
Lifting one shoulder in a very tight shrug, Peter says, “So he won’t kill you.”
And then he looks up at Caspian’s unguarded face, his startled dark eyes, and he thinks: oh, to hell with it. And he pulls Caspian down with one hand, half-rising on his other elbow to meet him halfway and crush their mouths together in the most uncomfortable and awkward kiss Peter has ever attempted.
He’s never kissed anyone upside-down before. He can’t say he’s ever thought about it, or any of the logistics, though he’s certainly thought about kissing Caspian quite a lot. More than he’d like to admit, really, ever since he got a good look at him in the wood and forgot all at once how to breathe. It’s not an easy business, to say the least, and he very nearly gives up on it after just a second or two, thinking, He must think I’m mad, and, He’s going to hate me.
But then Caspian opens his mouth and kisses Peter back, searing and thorough and annoyingly perfect, and Peter pretty much stops thinking after that.
Somehow, through a lot of fumbling and banging of knees and elbows, which hardly matters in the moment, the business of kissing becomes quite a bit less awkward with both of them on the Stone Table, no longer upside down, Caspian’s thumb set neatly over where Peter’s pulse thunders against his skin as he tips his head back, lets Caspian mouth the seam of throat and jaw. He had a scar there, once, he remembers dizzily. A long scratch from a Satyr’s horn, one of the remnants of the Witch’s army they hunted down in the months following her defeat. Going back through the wardrobe means he lost it along with everything else, but going back through the wardrobe also led him here, to the center of the How, to Caspian’s mouth on him like a wound, to Caspian’s hands pulling him back into a body he’s worried he’ll only ever haunt for the rest of his life.
Feather-light, Caspian moves lower, presses a kiss and then a palm to the spot just over Peter’s rabbiting heart, where once there was a dagger, a wound, the memory of both. Peter gasps.
“Don’t,” he manages when Caspian pulls back a moment to look down at him. He reaches up, traces the line of his cheek, his jaw—is surprised to find his fingers steady. “Don’t stop.”
Caspian ducks down again so his mouth is very near Peter’s neck again, lips and teeth and breath on skin. “Why would I stop?”
Peter shivers. “I don’t know.”
But the lie must seep into something of his tone, his face, because Caspian touches his cheek and asks, gently, “Peter. What are you afraid of?”
Perhaps a better question might be what isn’t Peter Pevensie afraid of, but Caspian is watching him, open and steady and deserving of the truth, so without much thought, Peter admits, “Leaving.”
Leaving, dying, it’s all the same thing, really. He may not survive single combat with Miraz. He might survive it and have to go back to England after. He may live another fifteen golden years in Narnia and walk through the wrong door and find himself bruised and angry in a London station. Anything could happen. Anything could be. Peter can’t see what’s coming, can’t even guess, and he is afraid. Who wouldn’t be?
“Do you want to?” Caspian asks.
Peter blinks up at him, startled. “What?”
“Do you want,” Caspian repeats, shifting (rather disappointingly) off of Peter to lie beside him in the cradle of the cracked tabletop, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, “to leave?”
“No.”
“All right,” says Caspian, like that settles it. Like it’s simple. Peter thinks about saying, I didn’t want to leave last time, but then his hand is on Peter’s neck, jaw, turning his face toward Caspian’s and holding him there, lightly, until he looks. Until he sees. “Stay.”
Palm still splayed on Peter’s cheek, he leans in again, and Peter does not stop him, nor does Peter want him to stop.
🜲
“I still wish you would allow me to face Miraz instead,” Caspian tells him later, playing absently with Peter’s hand as they lie nestled in the very heart of the How. Of Narnia itself. “The Telmarine throne is mine by rights. I should be the one challenging him for it.”
“Do you want the boring political reasons why that’s a bad idea?” Peter asks, glancing over at him. “Ed would know more, but I can think of quite a few. He wouldn’t take you seriously, for one. He’s probably already branded you as a traitor. He’d never risk letting you near enough to tell anyone about what he did to your father. Besides—”
Caspian sighs. “That does not make it feel any less my responsibility.” He glances over at Peter thoughtfully and asks, “What is the other reason?”
“Did I say there was another?”
This poor attempt at evasion earns him a wisp of a smile. “You implied it.”
Well, Peter thinks, in for a penny.
“I don’t think you should have to,” he admits. It hasn’t exactly been a topic of conversation when making plans of war, but he was there in the castle. In Miraz’s chambers. He saw the way Caspian hesitated there where he did not in battle. Villain or not, murderer or not, Miraz is still his uncle. His kin, as Caspian rightfully pointed out. It wouldn’t be right, asking him to fight family to the death.
Family is something you die for, not something you kill. Peter ought to know.
“He’s your uncle,” he says. “I don’t think anyone should have to do that.”
When he turns to Caspian, he finds him looking back with something like wonder in his eyes.
“You are the strangest creature I have ever met,” Caspian marvels quietly, and Peter wonders why it is this, of all things, that makes his heart stutter, face heat.
“You’ve met a Talking Badger and Mice with swords,” he points out, unable to resist.
“So I have,” Caspian replies, but he does not take it back. His eyes do not leave Peter’s face, well-dark and curious and—other things, too.
“Well,” Peter manages, “I could say the same of you.”
A corner of Caspian’s mouth lifts, then the other. He stops playing with Peter’s hand and threads their fingers together instead. “You will be careful when you face him?”
Peter nods.
“Good.” With his other hand, Caspian reaches out and slides his fingers around the back of Peter’s neck, nudging forward so their foreheads rest together. He smells like sweat and stone and horse. Like home.
“Why is that?”
He huffs. “Because I am not finished with you.”
Peter laughs. “No? I rather like the sound of that.”
Caspian’s skin is warm against his. Peter has forgotten the Stone Table entirely. It can’t last forever, this little bubble of peace they’ve found beneath the earth, away from it all, but for now, there is silence and the sound of Caspian’s breathing, and his touch is a lighthouse Peter follows back to himself, standing on the shore.