Archive of Our Own

“in lieu of
flowers, send
him back.”

—“refusal to mourn”, andrea cohen

“and when i find you / you touch my leg and i insist / but i wake up before we do it.”

—“garden song”, phoebe bridgers

𐂂

It is a crisp autumn night when Caspian wakes to find Peter Pevensie on his balcony, sitting with his knees drawn up, very close to where Caspian lies upon the stone. For a moment, Caspian studies him in the moonlight—the scattered freckles, the stray wisps of hair, the line of his nose—and wishes more than anything this were real.

“This is a dream,” he says softly instead.

Peter doesn’t so much as glance his way, though Caspian can see his throat working in the starlight as he swallows. “I gathered.”

He’s close enough that Caspian could reach out a hand and touch him, the way he never dared to in wakefulness, not until after it was too late. He tucks his fingers into his palms instead. Too often, he has found, grasping at a dream only ends it sooner instead of making it last.

“Where are we?” Peter murmurs, taking in the balcony around them.

“Shouldn’t you know,” asks Caspian, “if this is a dream? One always seems to know everything in dreams.”

“Oh, not at all,” Peter says, and when he peers back at Caspian, there is a bitter sort of smile on his face. His knuckles are white around his own arms, blanched pale as bone, as the last time Caspian saw him, his grip tightening around his sheathed sword before he relinquished it into Caspian’s shaking palm. “You only think so, and then you wake up and realize it was all a load of nothing, and you don’t really know anything.” He looks down and away, suddenly, hair falling into his eyes. “Anything at all.”

“We are on the balcony adjoining my rooms,” Caspian tells him, because he can’t think of a single other thing to say. Now he is the one who looks away; he can’t quite stand to keep looking at Peter, to see the echo of his face when he handed Caspian the very blade that rests between them now, sheathed and half hidden amongst the blankets, though that much Peter hasn’t seemed to notice. He does not want to remember that this is only a shadow of what was, and that Peter, the real one, has left Narnia—forever.

This Peter scuffs a bare foot through the mess of quilts beneath them. “What are you— you’re not sleeping out here, are you?” When Caspian does not answer, he asks, mystified, “Why? You’ve got a bed, haven’t you?”

Caspian swallows, almost reaching for Rhindon’s hilt before thinking better of it. “I…do not care for the curtains.”

“The…? So take them down. Christ.”

Now he sounds more like the Peter Caspian remembers, that mix of concern and mild irritation which was once so easy to mistake for disdain but was really anything but. Somehow, it makes everything about this dream that much worse.

He releases a frustrated sigh. “That is not the point.”

“So tell me,” Peter invites, and it sounds like he means it, but of course it’s not Peter at all. It’s a dream and nothing more.

Caspian closes his eyes. “What would be the purpose of that?”

He swears he can hear Peter stiffen beside him, go closed off and distant, like a lake icing over, a door swinging shut. Even at arm’s length, even with his eyes closed, it’s unmistakable—that vivid crackling sort of feeling you only get in dreams.

Or perhaps every part of Caspian is still attuned to Peter Pevensie, even now that he has left.

“Fine,” says Peter shortly. “Don’t tell me. I’m sorry I asked.”

“I didn’t mean—” Caspian begins, startled by the hurt in his tone, but when he opens his eyes, the balcony is empty. Peter is gone, and Caspian is alone, like before. Like always.

That much, Caspian knows, is not a dream. No matter how much he wishes it were.

𐂂

Depending on where you start, this is a story about wishes, or a story about dreams, or even second chances, though sometimes they are all sides of the same thing. It is also a story about love. And as it happens, it does not start with a dream, with a night on a balcony when autumn has just begun to set the leaves of the western woods aflame.

Not quite.

Nor does it start with a wish, exactly, for nothing truly begins with a wish. There’s always a reason for them. Maybe that reason was a sword upon the dais before Aslan and Narnia both. Maybe it was a sword upon a dueling ground before the How, or one clashing against Caspian’s in the sunlit wood. Maybe they are all parts of the same whole, the origin of an unspoken, unshaped yearning in Caspian’s chest, which he thinks will never have the chance to be anything more.

In truth, it starts much as Narnia’s Golden Age ended—which is to say, with a ride, and a forest, and what some might call fate.

It starts, simply put, with a Stag.

𐂂

The first night after the Pevensies have departed Narnia, it storms fiercer than Caspian has ever witnessed. Fiercer, Glenstorm tells him solemnly, than time out of mind. Not since the gale that followed the end of the Golden Age, which lasted seven days and nights and flooded every stream from Beaversdam to the River Rush, has Narnia seen such weather. It was the ancient Narnians’ first clue that their Kings and Queens were truly gone, vanished right out of the world without a hint or a trace. Afterward, they called the deluge Narnia’s Lament, an event passed down in parts of Narnian history Caspian has never had the chance to hear until now.

“The land weeps for their departure,” the Centaur says, stamping one hoof as they watch servants hurrying to latch shutters banging about in the howling wind. “It has never quite forgotten its Kings and Queens of old.”

Nor will it.

“How long do you think it will last?” Caspian asks, voice raised to combat the noise of the oncoming storm.

Glenstorm shakes his head, tail swishing across his hocks. His face is even more solemn than usual. “Grief is not to be rushed. Only time will tell.”

That night, Caspian cannot sleep—not amid the thunder and the moaning wind; and not after everything that happened here, all the memories, even with all traces of destruction removed but for the scratches soldiers’ bolts gouged into the stone. Walls, of course, are not so easily replaced as a mattress, or the curtains hung around his bed.

There are sentries stationed outside his door—Narnians, specifically; Trumpkin, a Minotaur, one of the Fauns, in the event of any remaining Telmarine lords deciding it might be easier to finish what Caspian’s uncle started than adjust to this new way of life—but Caspian would rather be alone than have an attachment of guards shadowing his every step, so he slips out of his rooms through the passage in the back of his wardrobe, an echo of a night that still leaves a bitter film on the back of his tongue.

Peter’s sheathed sword in hand, he wanders the halls for a time, listening to Narnia’s grief hurling itself against brick and mortar, tower and stone. All its sound and fury makes no difference in the fact that the Pevensies are gone, but sometimes Caspian wants to fling himself down and scream his throat raw at the injustice of it all, so he thinks he understands how Narnia must feel, just a little.

Eventually, worn-thin and weary, he finds himself outside the rooms the Pevensies were given during their short stay in the castle. Perhaps because he is exhausted, or because he is alone, or simply perhaps because he is tired of lying, of hiding how he feels, Caspian sleeps in the bed that was Narnia’s High King’s for less than a week, with sheets that smell more of dried lavender than Peter himself, and lets himself weep for what never could have been.

𐂂

In the morning, the storm has receded to a steady drizzle. When Caspian returns to his chambers, Trumpkin levels him with an impressively disapproving glare, but does not ask where he has been all night, for which Caspian is grateful. Indeed, no one presses the matter, for they are all mourning in their own ways, and Caspian is glad of that, too. At least in this he is not alone.

Still, he spends the next night in his own chambers, and the next, until he is certain the rooms where Narnia’s Kings and Queens of legend slept have been cleaned and refreshed, leaving no trace of their presence behind, and tells himself it is for the best. Whatever Caspian thought of them, however his stomach lurched when Peter looked at him, sometimes, focused and intense, as though Caspian were the only other person in the world—it’s over. It never even began. Caspian has other things to think of now: a kingdom to rule, a people to look after. He can’t afford to stay caught up in the past.

The heart, however, is a stubborn creature, and this is something Caspian is about to learn.

𐂂

He comes across the Stag by chance more than anything, though before the end, he will wonder if chance was ever the right word for it. Instinct, perhaps, might be better, or even magic—Deep Magic, the sort that determines fate, governs destiny. The fabled White Stag and hopes that are not yet shaped like the wishes it gives go together, call to one another, pulled in like moths to a flame, like help to whoever winds Susan’s horn.

All this is to say Caspian does not seek it like the Pevensies so long ago, nor Narnians before them, in the days of the White Witch, hoping to wish their way out of endless winter, or the great nobles and heroes and hunters who came before the Witch ever set foot back in Narnia. In those days, the Tree of Protection grew rooted and strong on the banks of the Great River, not so far now from where Caspian takes his early morning rides, though he does not know this particular detail, and likely never will. Not all of Narnia’s history weathered the invasions of the Witch and the Telmarines both, after all.

It happens like this: each morning at dawn, Caspian saddles Destrier and rides west from castle to Lantern Waste so he might manage an hour or so of peace to clear his head before returning to the weight of kingship that day. It has been long enough since his coronation that Caspian has found something of a routine, but not so long that he has set aside all his doubts about whether or not he is truly fit for such responsibility as kingship. The fact that Narnia has not fallen to war nor assassination nor fire and flood is, he thinks, a good sign, but doubt is perhaps as difficult to rid oneself of as love or even hope. So every morning, Caspian rides, and he thinks, and (though he doesn’t quite know it) he wishes.

In more ways than one, he takes these rides not merely to clear his head, but to find himself; the man he wants to be. Today, though, knee deep in a stream, leading Destrier for a drink, Caspian looks up at great antlers, twitching ears, and ancient dark-gold eyes, and realizes he has found the White Stag instead. Or perhaps it is the Stag that has found him.

“Oh,” he says, without a thought of what else he might possibly say. “You are—oh.”

“I am,” says the Stag mildly, which really oughtn’t be such a surprise by now, given that most of Caspian’s advisors and guards and friends are at least partially animal and fully sentient, with no qualms whatsoever about speaking their minds, and yet hearing the Stag’s velvet-rich voice nearly jolts him backward into the water in wonderment.

It is a powerful creature, with broad shoulders, gleaming hooves, and antlers spanning twice as wide as even the largest Talking Stag Caspian has yet seen. The bunch of muscles in its hindquarters as it steps delicately forward to the water’s edge and lowers its great head to drink suggest agility and power to rival even a Centaur in its prime.

Caspian wonders, somehow, if perhaps he ought to leave.

He takes one step backwards, gathering up Destrier’s reins, but the Stag says, “Stop,” and Caspian stops, uncertain, watching it raise its head, water pearling bright on its muzzle.

The Stag says, “I believe you are owed a wish, King of Narnia.”

Caspian blinks. “But I haven’t caught you.”

It flicks one pale-furred ear in something not unlike amusement. “There are more ways of catching a thing than you might think.”

“I do not understand,” he admits, which earns him a cloven hoof pawing at the pebbled shore. Caspian can’t help but notice that the Stag’s hide and haunch are unmarred by the muddy bank. The water sloughs right off of it as though it were made of glass.

“Nor will you,” it says. “For the time being.”

“Do you tell fortunes as well as grant wishes?” he cannot help but ask, and the Stag snorts, shaking its head in what might be a laugh, but is rendered perhaps more threatening (given its great rack of antlers) than it otherwise might have been.

“I am telling you the present, not the future,” the Stag replies. “The future is not a thing of absolutes, only a hope of what may be, and what so you shall make of it. And I do not grant wishes. I give them to those who have earned them. What happens afterward is not up to me.”

Shaking the last beads of water from its hooves, it turns as if to leave, and Caspian lurches forward a step, the smoothed stones of the riverbed rolling beneath his boots. Destrier snorts and jerks up his head at the movement, flinging droplets through the misty morning air. “Wait!”

The White Stag waits, looking back at him with strangely reflective eyes.

Flushing, Caspian manages, “I thought you said I was to make a wish.”

“Son of Adam,” says the Stag, something twinkling almost merrily in its eye, “you do not choose your wishes. You may only want them.”

It turns and bounds back towards the thicket, but stops just shy of disappearing into the undergrowth, pawing at the mossy forest floor.

It calls, “I will tell you this much: it will come to you when you least expect it, how you least expect it, and more than likely at night.”

He takes this in. “Then it is like a dream.”

“What is a dream,” says the Stag, “but a wish? What is desire? What is hope?”

“I see your point.”

“I am not so sure that you do,” remarks the Stag, “but everyone does, given time.”

And then with one great leap, it is gone. Caspian does not see the White Stag again for the rest of his life, which is more than most anyone else in Narnia can say.

𐂂

Caspian does not forget his encounter with the Stag, exactly, but eventually it is lost among more pressing matters—skirmishes with Calormene bandits, envoys from Archenland and the Seven Isles, dozens of conflicts between Narnians and Telmarines to resolve in the midst of restructuring and reclaiming old lands—so that by the time he dreams of Peter gazing quietly upwards and saying, You don’t know anything at all in dreams, more or less, that’s all he thinks it is.

It has been all but forgotten to Narnia, after all, that wishes are powerful magic (fickle animals though they may be, conforming to the wisher’s heart’s desire, which may be changeable as the wind itself) and magic is a thing that waxes and wanes, which is often strongest when seasons turn. It has been forgotten, also, that wishes may be long in the making, and longer still in coming true.

𐂂

Peter’s first night back in England—the first night, he realizes, of the rest of his life—he falls asleep sitting on the floor by the window, staring up at the sky. None of the stars are familiar.

He dreams of Narnia, which he ought to be used to by now. He dreamed of it even when he was there, dozing off by the campfire in the Shuddering Wood; in the How; those few nights in the castle when he paced his rooms for hours before deciding, no, it would be foolish to hope, even more so to try, and eventually convinced himself to lie down and sleep instead of seeking out Caspian and asking him if Peter wasn’t the only one who wanted things he really shouldn’t have. He dreamed of it even in those days when he was King, falling asleep every night to the humming of the land in his heart and his bones, let himself rest easy in the knowledge that Narnia was his and he was hers and nothing—he thought—would change that.

He isn’t Narnia’s anymore, not according to Aslan, even though it was he who faced them on the dais in summer and intoned Once a King or Queen of Narnia and all that. But his heart still is, it seems, because Peter falls asleep and finds himself there again, which he can’t say is unexpected.

But it’s not the same. It’s not at all what he expects. It’s not Lantern Waste in autumn, the eastern sea in spring. It’s not Cair Paravel, nor Beruna, nor a great summer feast on the Dancing Lawn. It is none of the things Peter has grown used to dreaming of, to missing.

It’s Caspian.

He dreams of Caspian. The night sky he knows by heart above them. The starlight in his hair.

He wakes with salt-wet cheeks and a cramp in his neck, and he doesn’t fall back asleep for a long, long time.

𐂂

“Are you going to snap at me about the curtains again?” asks Peter, and Caspian blearily blinks open his eyes to see him standing with one hip against the balustrade, arms folded, face angled away from where Caspian has fallen asleep—mostly unintentionally, this time—sitting back against the wall.

“No,” Caspian says hoarsely, trying and failing to rub sleep from his eyes. “That was unfair of me. I apologize.”

Peter lifts one shoulder in a tense sort of shrug. Caspian takes him in curiously; this version his dream has given him. He wears a shirt and breeches very like the clothing the Pevensies donned to return to their world, but a little looser, a little softer, in blue and white. Things to sleep in, he thinks. The buttons are unlike any Caspian has seen—some sort of bone, perhaps? The pants, he notices, are too short, cutting off above Peter’s ankles, as though he has just started to outgrow them, but no one has minded enough to replace them just yet. It makes sense Caspian would picture him this way, he supposes. Their English clothing (as they called it) never seemed to suit Peter the Magnificent, but Caspian found himself captivated at the glimpse it offered of another world, and of Peter’s place within it.

“Are you going to vanish again?” Caspian hazards to ask.

“That’s what happens when you wake up,” Peter says, “I can’t control that. Obviously.”

“I suppose that makes sense,” he concedes. He still feels groggy, off-kilter. He used to have lucid dreams as a child, ones where he would suddenly realize he was dreaming and call forth his parents, sometimes, or Aslan, or more often the Kings and Queens, all the old Narnian stock who he thought (back then) were gone forever. Caspian had so hated to wake up from those dreams. This feels almost like that, except Caspian feels less like he is dreaming and more as though he is simply not quite awake.

“So,” Peter says, and then he says nothing at all, staring down at his fingers, picking at a fraying spot on the cuff of his sleeve.

“So,” Caspian echoes softly. He casts about for something to say and lands on, “Would you care to sit?”

“I suppose.” Peter crosses the balcony, dropping cross-legged onto the spot Caspian indicates at his side—close, but not too close. Enough that Caspian would have to reach to touch him.

Caspian is certainly thinking about touching him, but always he fears the evaporation of the dream, his climb into wakefulness. As he has grown older, it has become ever harder to remain lucid and dreaming for very long, if it happens at all. For a long time now, most of his dreams have been anxious, stifled things, smothered by the darker side of Telmarine history Cornelius taught him, by the flashes of disdain he began to see more clearly in his uncle’s eyes. Then he escaped and fled to the Narnians, and he dreamed of bolts in the dark, midnight rides—of the Witch and of war and of everything terrible.

He was beginning to think he has forgotten how to have anything other than nightmares. Part of him wonders if this might become one yet.

“I miss the constellations here,” Peter startles him by saying. When Caspian looks at him, he has his head tipped back, hands curled limply in his lap, eyes gazing distantly at the night sky above. “I don’t remember any of the ones back in England.”

“Oh,” Caspian says.

“Oh, what?”

He pulls a knee to his chest, laces his fingers around it. “I suppose I thought all worlds shared the same sky. Narnia, and yours, and Aslan’s country.”

“I don’t know about Aslan’s country,” Peter replies, “but—no. They don’t. Everything’s different back…home.”

He says the word like it cuts him. It might cut Caspian, too.

Peter adds, “I don’t know any of the stars there. There aren’t as many, and they’re not as bright. The moon’s smaller, too. And they don’t sing—or if they do, you can never get high enough to hear it over the sound of everything else. Perhaps they’re too far away. I don’t know.”

“That sounds—” Caspian hesitates, searching for the right word.

“Depressing?” he snorts.

“Lonely.”

Peter says, “Ah,” more an exhalation of breath than anything else, a little sharper than a sigh—the sort of noise one makes when something hurts rather more than expected.

They don’t say much of anything after that, just sit and watch the stars wheel overhead in silence and a soft sort of haze, until Caspian suddenly finds himself sitting upright with a start and realizing it’s dawn, and he’s awake, and he really must have fallen asleep on the balcony the night before.

He hopes wherever Peter is, it isn’t truly lonely like that. Like this.

𐂂

“Did you sleep at all last night?” Edmund asks him at breakfast, giving him a look he must have learned from Susan when Peter wasn’t looking. 

“Yes,” Peter says, more to his toast than to Edmund. That’s entirely the problem.

𐂂

“Are you going to sleep out here in winter, too?”

Caspian bolts upright, scrabbling for Rhindon beside him before realizing it’s just Peter again, crouching beside him with the moonlight in his hair—that this is just another dream. Now that Peter mentions it, the autumn night has become rather chilled, but Caspian is not yet cold enough to retreat indoors, to deal with the way the bed in his chambers still makes his throat close off and his breath quicken and his dreams much less pleasant than this, whatever this is meant to be.

He says, honestly, “I don’t know.”

“Caspian,” Peter says, rocking back on his heels, and he can’t help but inhale, just a little, at the sound of his name in Peter’s mouth, “come on. What’s so bloody awful about some curtains? You can’t very well be a good King of Narnia if you freeze yourself to death.”

Caspian grasps at his wrist and is surprised to find it warm and solid—almost real to the touch. He can feel the fine hairs on the back of it, Peter’s pulse quickening against his fingers.

Distantly, he hears himself say, “I nearly died in that room.”

Peter says nothing. His gaze flicks between Caspian’s hand and his face. His eyes are very dark in the starlight.

“My uncle sent soldiers to kill me in my sleep. I watched their bolts destroy the bed where I was meant to be. The curtains. I saw it all.”

Peter’s fingers twitch. “Caspian.”

“It is…difficult,” Caspian continues, brushing his thumb across the skin of Peter’s inner wrist, feeling him jump and shudder faintly, “to sleep there. When I remember.”

“You’re going to have to eventually,” Peter says, because even now, even in Caspian’s dreams, it seems he retains his irritating habit of saying inconveniently truthful things, things Caspian wishes not to confront on his own. It’s another one of the things Caspian misses about him, along with his courage, his insight, his smile.

“I know,” he whispers, because he does. “But this is a dream.”

“Yes,” Peter says, and he sounds— he sounds sad, Caspian thinks. But his pulse still rabbits under Caspian’s thumb, and even though this is merely a dream, he is here, and Caspian is touching him, he is letting Caspian touch him instead of snatching his wrist away and retreating into the shadows as he did when Caspian tried it once in the half-dark beneath the How. And Caspian is lonely, terribly so, and suddenly he can’t help himself anymore. But why should he have to?

“If this is a dream,” Caspian murmurs, “I should like it to be a good one.”

And then he tugs Peter downwards, his other hand coming up to cant his jaw just so as Caspian kisses him the way he never could in wakefulness.

He knows immediately and innately that it cannot be real, simply by the way Peter does not pull away. He sighs faintly instead, leaning into Caspian’s touch and kissing him unreservedly back. The Peter he knew kept Caspian at arm’s length, often sword’s length, even as he stood close enough for Caspian to reach out and touch, looked at him sometimes out of the corner of his eye or across a room in a way that left Caspian hungry, breathless, hot to the touch.

Perhaps, with time, they could have become something, could have felt out the space between them and known for sure what they were, what they wanted—but time was just one of many things they didn’t have, and so Caspian will never know. But he is cold, and he is lonely, and he aches to be touched, seen, known, so he holds onto this dream with both hands and lets the knowledge that it’s nothing more slide away like waves down a beach.

Peter kisses like he fights: breathless, quick, and sharp, always finding a way through Caspian’s guard. He’s all teeth and touch and hard lines—hip, shoulder, jaw—pressing down on Caspian as though he intends to search out every inch, every niche, every hidden tender spot. Caspian thinks, perhaps a little dizzily, he wouldn’t so much mind letting him. But he also craves what they never had the time for before: gentleness, leisure, careful exploration. He wants to find the ways Peter likes to be touched; the best ways to kiss him. He wants to take his time, to mouth him, to map him, to commit every part of him to memory. He wants the chance to take things slow.

He wants to stay here in this moment forever.

Pressing a hand against Peter’s chest long enough to stay him, Caspian breathes, “Slower. We have time.”

Peter exhales sharply. His eyes are closed. “We didn’t. We don’t.”

“We do now.” Caspian traces the line of his neck, his jaw, presses his thumb to Peter’s lower lip. “Here.”

“Caspian—”

But Caspian leans in and kisses him in a tender place just below his jaw, and then he kisses him on the mouth to swallow the noise Peter makes at the touch, and somewhere in all of this, Peter stops talking. Caspian does, too.

𐂂

He dreams he’s on his back, Caspian kneeling over him, skating the fingers of one hand along his side—ribs, waist, hip; feeling at the hem of his shirt, thumbing the warm line of skin beneath. This is not the first time Peter has dreamed of Caspian, nor of Caspian touching him, but it is, perhaps, the first time he does not want it to stop. He thinks he could not bear it if it did.

For a long moment, Caspian rests his forehead against Peter’s, skin on skin, and Peter lets him. They breathe—not touching but for this, not doing anything anymore, just breathing. Just being.

When he pulls away, shifts his weight, Peter breathes out shakily and keeps his eyes closed, as though perhaps he can make this last longer if only he doesn’t look.

“Peter,” says Caspian softly, like a sigh. Like a question. He touches Peter’s thigh lightly, quickly, like Peter is a nervous animal, one unused to gentleness, one he doesn’t want to spook.

“Please,” is all Peter can choke out, reaching up blindly until his questing fingertips meet the skin of Caspian’s cheek for a moment—there and then gone. He snatches his hand back quickly, afraid of many things—of the desire singing in his chest. Of himself. They aren’t quite touching, now, but he can feel Caspian over him, a warm presence he cannot shake, does not even want to.

Things have gone further than he expected. Hoped.

But don’t dreams always?

“Please,” Peter repeats, because he doesn’t know how else to ask for what he wants.

But when he opens his eyes, Narnia, Caspian—all of it is gone. He’s back at school, in the dark, alone.

Please, he thinks to anyone that might be listening, but of course no one is. He’s too old for Narnia now. Too old to believe in getting things he wants—things he knows he can never have. Not even in Narnia. Not even if he tried.

Peter shoves his face into his pillow and screams. No one’s listening to that either.

𐂂

“What are you doing?” Caspian asks curiously, perhaps a little apprehensively, watching Peter march across his bedchambers.

“Taking down the blasted curtains,” Peter tells him, and begins to do just that. With his back to Caspian—perhaps a blessing, because it means he does not see the color rise in Caspian’s cheeks—he adds, “It’s freezing out there. Do you want to catch your death?”

There’s hardly any danger of that, of course, given the way Caspian watches him work—or rather, fumble frustratedly with the hooks and mostly fail at removing them—and feels warm all over.

“You don’t have to do that,” he says.

“If I don’t, you’re going to freeze to death on your balcony.”

Caspian sets his fingers against Peter’s shoulder blade, warm through his shirt, and Peter stutters to a stop at the touch. “I meant,” he says, quietly and very close to Peter’s ear, which he watches go flushed the way he remembers it used to and smiles, faintly, “that I will take them down in the morning.”

Peter doesn’t look at him, but he also doesn’t move away.

Softly, he asks, “And now?”

“It will be simpler to show you.”

He exhales. His shoulders do not drop from their tense line, but he does not pull away, either. “So show me.”

And Caspian does.

𐂂

He stops sleeping on the balcony so much after that. And he takes the curtains down.

𐂂

The dreams keep happening. It’s not every night that Caspian has them, mind, but often enough that he still feels like a wound when he wakes: gaping, raw, fleshwet to the touch. Some mornings he swears the blankets are rumpled and warm from more than merely his own body—but of course, it’s only wishful thinking. Caspian can’t afford to live in the past forever, nor in dreams of it.

His body of course, or at least his mind, has other ideas.

They’re never the same, the dreams—always just different enough to feel real, to fool him into believing they could be while they last. Perhaps this is because they almost always seem to take place against the same backdrop: his rooms, bed, balcony, as though Caspian has not fallen asleep at all but walked into a waking dream, one which might go on and on if only the night would, too.

Still, he misses seeing Peter in sunlight, gilding all his edges, eyes clear as the skies he was named for. He was easier to understand in daylight. Easier to read, with his emotions written so clearly upon his face, in the way he held himself, shoulders back and jaw set. In Caspian’s dreams, darkness cloaks him and moonlight obfuscates, reminding Caspian of how little he had the chance to know for certain. Sometimes, he lies staring at the stars or the ceiling overhead and wishes his dreams would take him back to the wood, the river, the coronation—Peter’s hands on his shoulders, lips against his brow. They never do.

There is only darkness, then morning, and Caspian alone in his rooms.

Some leave him waking flushed and disordered; a mess. Those dreams are not at all unwelcome, but they just as often leave him feeling hollowed out, chest as cold and empty as his bed when morning’s light creeps in. Mostly, though, he has other sorts of dreams. Ones where they simply lie side by side and talk, elbows pressed together as Caspian voices the doubts and frustrations he’s never managed to tell anyone else about—all his fears about kingship, about himself. Sometimes Peter offers advice, good advice, and reassurances. Sometimes he will hook one finger around Caspian’s, press his thumb to the inside of Caspian’s wrist.

Somehow, Caspian thinks those are the worst dreams, but he knows he would miss them if they stopped, almost as much as he misses Peter, the real Peter, and all the chances they never got.

He wonders if Peter, worlds away, dreams of him, too. If he ever feels the same. If he ever lies awake and wonders what could have been, ever touches himself and thinks of Caspian, the way Caspian does of him on sleepless, lonely nights.

He’s not so certain he wants to know.

𐂂

“I saw a shooting star last night,” Peter says, though he’s not sure why. It’s nothing of note, a single star in England when he’s climbed mountains just to hear the ones in Narnia sing. He almost didn’t realize what it was—thought it might have been a plane. The Germans. But it was just a star, a wink, there and then gone, and Edmund was asleep, so he had no one to share it with.

Still has no one, really. But it’s nice to tell someone, even if it’s all in his head.

“Stars can shoot?” Caspian asks. “I was not aware they had weapons. Do they ever go to war?”

Peter laughs, startled, reaching to muffle the sound on instinct before remembering he’s not in a dormitory in England—more or less, anyway—and he doesn’t have to be so quiet here. “Not like that. A falling star. A meteor.” He winces, realizing meteors are not exactly something he’s equipped to explain, seeing as he hardly understands them himself. Instead, before he can think better of how silly it is, he adds, “I forgot to wish on it, though.”

There is a rustling of bedclothes, and Peter glances over to see Caspian has rolled onto his side to consider him, that old familiar curiosity written on every line of his face. It’s a look Peter is horribly fond of.

“I thought,” Caspian murmurs, “you said there was no magic in your world.”

“There isn’t.”

“So why would you wish on a star?” His mouth twists thoughtfully to one side. “I have never heard of stars granting wishes.”

“They don’t,” Peter admits, curling onto his own side to face Caspian, their bodies like parenthesis on either side of the mattress, neatly sealing all their words between. “Not even in Narnia. But it’s not about that, really. People just—people just wish, I guess, even if wishes don’t come true. Everyone wants something. I suppose it’s nice to pretend you might actually get it.”

Caspian hums, running his fingers along a fold in the coverlet. They’re nice fingers, as far as Peter remembers—long and slender; calloused, yes, but not bitten to hell like Peter’s. It probably means Peter spent too long watching Caspian finger the rivets on his brigandine or trace the fraying embroidery on his tunic if he can remember them so well. If he’s still noticing.

“What would you have wished for?” Caspian asks him, almost as though the question itself as a secret just for them. His eyes are darker than ever in the moonlight.

And Peter closes his own eyes, swallowing roughly past what feels like a fistful of broken glass. “To be here. Really here.”

He can hear Caspian release a breath, though it’s not quite a sigh. Something akin to one, perhaps, though sadder. Heavier.

“What about you? What would you wish for?”

There is a rustling, and then fingertips nudging up against his, splayed out on the rumpled sheets.

Caspian says, softly, “This.”

𐂂

He lied, is the thing, Peter thinks later, watching dawn creep greyly up the walls from his uncomfortable dormitory bed.

He would have wished different. Not for something different. Just—more. And it would have been futile, pointless, a little desperate to boot, because there is no magic in this world, and because he’s been told, though in not so many words, that he will never have what he wants, never even know if he could, but one thing he didn’t lie about is this: people wish. Even when they know they want impossible things. Maybe because of the impossibility.

People wish.

So does Peter.

𐂂

“How long can a wish last?” Caspian asks in one dream, one where he woke—or thought he woke—in his bed to Peter beside him, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. As though it ever could be. He has these dreams more frequently than he’d like to admit: nights where they lay side by side, where his mind surprises him with the amount of nonsensical details about the Pevensies’ world it can conjure for this dreamed-up Peter to say, so that even when Caspian is awake he finds it hard to recall which things were dreams and which ones Peter and the others truly told him. They’ve been talking about magic this time. And wishes.

He wants to ask what Peter thinks they would have wished for had they caught the White Stag, but he's not quite brave enough for that.

Peter hums. “As long as you want them, or so I’m told. They’re tricky things, wishes. Fickle.”

Like the heart, Caspian thinks but does not say. Instead, he tries, “A lifetime?”

Peter is silent for a long moment.

“No one,” he says at last, turning over in the bed so his back is to Caspian, which stings more than Caspian would like to admit, “wants anything that long.”

Caspian closes his eyes against the sudden and unwelcome prickling that arises behind them, breathes in slowly, then out.

Peter adds, quieter, “Not without getting it…or losing interest.”

When Caspian turns his head to look at him, he’s gone.

He always was.

𐂂

In truth, Peter’s never certain if the dreams are a blessing or a curse, filling the hole Narnia left inside him or digging it ever deeper come dawn. The morning after always feels like worming a fingertip into the meat of a wound, pushing it up to the knuckle into gristle and gore, like when the barb of an arrowhead broke off in his shoulder and they had to cut him open further to get at it before it could heal. Are the dreams the arrow, Peter wonders, or just the barb, or the knife that cuts both out?

Either way, he tells himself, they’re only dreams. They’ll fade with time, just as his nightmares of the Wolf and the river, just as his dreams of Narnia were starting to in England, back before, going blurred and faded about the edges with age.

Or so he thinks, because one morning he catches a few of his classmates giving him knowing smirks, and then one of the teachers fixes him with a disapproving stare, and none of this is entirely new to Peter, seeing as he spent a year being a thorn in everyone’s side, so he would simply ignore it but for the fact that Edmund’s giving him funny looks, too.

It’s only when they have a moment in their shared room that evening that Peter finally asks him why, and he says, “It’s nothing, Peter.”

“It’s obviously something,” Peter replies, annoyed. He doesn’t mean to be so short, seeing as he’s trying to keep a better handle on his temper these days, but he always seems to be tired lately, as though all his life and energy drained out of him the moment they stepped out of Narnia, or as though he hasn’t managed much sleep the last few weeks at all, despite sleeping more or less the whole night through. Maybe it will always be like this in England, without the Narnian air to sustain him.

Edmund looks at him, and then away, mouth twisting into something rather complicated and altogether odd. “It’s just—you’re being careful, yeah?”

Peter squints at him, feeling nothing short of confused. “I haven’t started anything in ages. Christ, Ed. I’m not going to— to get expelled for fighting, or hurt, or whatever Susan’s told you to worry about—”

“That’s not what I meant,” Edmund replies, and now that look is back, and stranger than ever.

“Then what?”

His brother tucks his fists into his pockets and leans back against his desk, expression carefully neutral.

“It’s nice that you’ve found someone,” he says, to Peter’s complete and utter bewilderment, “but you might at least try hiding the marks on your neck if you want to keep things discreet. You’re not a good liar, Pete. You don’t want people asking questions, even if they just think it’s some girl you’re shacking up with. It’s different here, remember?”

This last part is said so unexpectedly gently that it takes Peter several lightheaded moments to register what Edmund’s saying, and even longer to understand. When he does, he goes rigid with shock, because it can’t be.

It just can’t.

Throat tight, he rasps, “The what?”

𐂂

“Caspian,” Peter says, startling Caspian upright in his bed, grasping for Rhindon, sheathed and hung over the bedpost. He sounds wrecked, and when Caspian blinks sleep and moonlight out of his eyes, can make out Peter standing at the foot of the bed, eyes wild, tense as a bowstring, he realizes he looks nothing short of it, too. “Why did you kiss me?”

Slowly, Caspian releases Rhindon’s hilt. “What?”

“Why,” Peter repeats, unmoving, “did you kiss me?”

What sort of dream is this? Caspian wonders. It feels—different, somehow. Changed. Charged, perhaps. He doesn’t even feel as though he’s really dreaming, but then, he never does.

“Because I wanted to,” he says, because it’s true. It always has been. He pulls back the covers and stands, the stone floors chilled against the soles of his feet, even through the carpets, but when he steps toward Peter, Peter moves away.

This is new, Caspian thinks, or perhaps rather old. This is something he would have expected before, when it was really Peter—who spooked easily, like a skittish horse, if Caspian ventured too close—and not some figment of his sleeping mind; his dreaming, lovesick heart.

“No,” says Peter, to himself more than Caspian, it seems. “No, that doesn’t make sense.”

“Peter—” Caspian tries, but what Peter says next robs him of anything he might have wanted to say.

Hoarsely, Peter says, “I’m not dreaming. I haven’t been. We haven’t been.”

He reels. “What?”

“This is real.”

“What?”

Peter is pacing now, fists clenched so tightly his nails must be deep enough into his palms to draw blood, but he still flinches back when Caspian tries to move towards him again, which— hurts. It hurts.

“I thought— I thought I was dreaming, I thought it wasn’t real, I thought I wasn’t supposed to be here.” It’s so jumbled and halting Caspian can barely make it out, much less process any of it. “Because you— and we— and there’s marks, dreams don’t leave marks, and Edmund— so it must be real, but that doesn’t make sense, and I’ve been trying to fall asleep for hours—”

He stops, turning to face Caspian, barefoot and disheveled in the moonlight streaming in through all the windows, and Caspian’s first thought is that he is beautiful. His second is that he is trembling.

“Peter,” he says, imploringly.

Peter breathes out very sharply. “It wasn’t supposed to be real.”

He finds it quite difficult to swallow, suddenly, and to breathe. “I did not know that it was.”

“Why,” Peter whispers, and then stops, swallows, nervously wets his lips. “If I didn’t dream it. Why did you kiss me?”

And he is afraid of what Peter will do if Caspian reaches for him again, so he stays where he is by the bed, keeps his hands firmly at his sides. “I told you already.”

“Tell me again.”

“I wanted to. I… I have always wanted to.”

There is little point in lying, after all, and especially after everything.

Peter’s brows furrow. “Then why didn’t you before?”

He can’t help the laugh that escapes him at that, short and a little bitter. “Would you have let me?” Caspian asks, nodding to the space between them, to how Peter has so rarely let him near enough to touch, much less on purpose.

And Peter looks away, which would be answer enough, only he’s not done. “I wanted to.” His voice is rough and uneven, a skinned palm against stone.

This, Caspian did not expect. He takes this in, all of it, from the implications of Peter’s words to the fluttering muscle in his jaw; his fingers, loosening from their clenched fists, twitching as he glances back at Caspian, afraid and—uncertain? Hopeful? Something else? Caspian can’t quite tell.

“Then why didn’t you?” he manages.

Peter’s gaze dips away from Caspian’s attempts to meet his eye, dropping down instead to where he’s begun worrying at one of his hands, tearing away a ragged strip from the tip of one thumbnail.

“I was afraid,” he admits, halting and quiet and as honest as Caspian has ever heard him.

“Of what?”

Peter whispers, “That I would like it.”

He looks up, then, and finally meets Caspian’s eye, and under his gaze Caspian finds his heart speeding to a trot, then a canter, then a stretched-out gallop, as though it means to break free of his chest entirely and dash right across his bedchambers into Peter’s waiting hands. As though there was anywhere else it could ever be.

Mouth suddenly and unbearably dry, pulse thundering in his ears, Caspian asks, “And did you?”

Before he’s even gotten the words out all the way, Peter is suddenly striding across the room, face set, sure as when he led them all into battle that day before the How. Caspian blinks, and Peter’s hands are at his jaw and the nape of his neck, and his mouth is hard and hot on Caspian’s own, and even as Caspian is fumbling for his hips, he’s walking Caspian back until they reach the bed, where Peter—not a dream, not a fantasy, but Peter all along—pushes him down onto it and proceeds to continue kissing him until Caspian is very certain indeed of his answer.

𐂂

It’s only when he wakes the next morning, alone once more among the rumpled blankets, that Caspian realizes Peter never did explain anything. Not in a way that Caspian could understand. They were a bit too preoccupied to talk after his back hit the bed, of course, but still.

Next time, he decides, closing his eyes and holding onto the night a little longer to savor, if not hope, then at least possibility—next time, he will ask. If there is a next time. If that wasn’t all another dream.

If he isn’t dreaming still.

𐂂

Nearly a week later, Peter sits beside him on his bed, legs folded beneath him, playing with the ends of a tassel on one of the pillows as he outlines the situation.

“But how do we know for certain that this is real?” Caspian asks.

“It is,” Peter says, sparing him a glancing look, “unless I’ve figured out how to bite my own neck in my sleep, or Edmund’s gone barking mad. Neither of which are particularly likely, mind.”

Caspian hums. “Suppose you aren’t real, though, and I am just dreaming that you’re saying that. How would I know?”

“Well, I could always bite your neck.”

Caspian throws a pillow at him, cheeks burning—and not because he is opposed to the suggestion. “Please be serious.”

“I was being serious,” Peter replies, and though Caspian can’t make himself look at him, he swears there’s a smile in Peter’s voice. “And I don’t hear you saying no.”

That would be because Caspian has no intention of saying no, but he elects not to mention that.

“How’s this,” Peter says, after a moment, nudging at Caspian’s arm with his foot. “Hand me that dagger.”

“What dagger?”

“The one you keep under your pillow, idiot. Did you think I hadn’t noticed?”

Caspian wrinkles his nose. “That is not a very proper way to speak to one’s King.”

Suddenly Peter is leaning over him, hands on either side of Caspian’s head, eyes gleaming in the light of the candle still burning beside the bed. His hair is burnished gold in its halo. There is a cluster of three freckles on the side of his neck, just below his jaw, like a constellation, one Caspian has touched and tasted before.

“You’re not,” Peter murmurs, leaning down so his lips are very near to Caspian’s ear, “my King, Caspian.”

“No?” Caspian halfway wheezes, suddenly warm despite the winter night. He feels the soft exhalation of breath that makes up Peter’s laugh, and then all at once Peter sits back upright, grinning, and in his hand is the knife Caspian does indeed keep beneath his pillow, already unsheathed.

Caspian hadn’t even felt him take it.

“If you want to be proper about it,” Peter tells him, twisting so he’s turned away from Caspian, facing the headboard of the bed, “my being High King would make me your King, not the other way around. Not that it really matters, seeing as we aren’t here anymore.”

There’s a scraping noise, and Caspian pushes himself up on one elbow, trying to make out what Peter’s doing over his shoulder.

“You are now,” he points out.

Peter hesitates, and he sounds a little sad when he says, “Not forever.”

Before Caspian can think of what to say to that, he finishes whatever he was doing to Caspian’s headboard and turns back around, offering him the dagger hilt-first. Caspian takes it automatically, groping blindly for the sheath under his pillow with his free hand.

“There,” Peter says, and points to a P carved into the wood near the middle of the headboard, where it might be easily hidden behind a pillow. Beside it is a single pale scratch. “It’ll be there in the morning, and you’ll know this was real.”

Once he has stowed the blade back where it belongs, Caspian reaches out and presses a thumb to the carving, feeling the difference in texture, a stray splinter needling at the pad of his finger.

“How much of it was real?” he asks quietly. “Before this. Before we knew.”

Peter watches Caspian push a thumbnail into the freshly carved wood, and Caspian watches him watch it. He says, “Enough.”

𐂂

They go over things properly, in the end, because Caspian is possessed of the sort of curiosity often known to kill cats, and Peter can’t think of a reason to tell him no.

“The first night on the balcony,” Caspian says, his ankle crossed over one of Peter’s, “when you told me to take the curtains down.”

“Real,” Peter answers, recalling the first of many not-quite dreams—the mess of blankets, the autumn night. And among them—wait. He frowns. “You sleep with my sword?”

Caspian huffs, rolling over and grumbling something into the pillow. What little of his face Peter can make out past his attempts to hide it is deeply flushed.

“I’m not making fun,” Peter insists, feeling his own cheeks heat. “Honest.”

Sighing, Caspian removes his face from the bedclothes. “Real.”

Peter says, eloquently, “I didn’t— I didn’t realize.”

He’s not sure what else there is to say. Caspian, however, does not seem to be possessed of the same uncertainty.

“Peter.” When Peter looks at him, Caspian continues, “You thought they were all dreams?”

“So did you,” he feels a need to point out.

Caspian shakes his head. “Yes, but— I kissed you.”

Peter coughs, looks away. “More than that.”

Caspian, blessedly, ignores this. He repeats, “And you thought it was a dream.”

There’s a question in there, one he’s not quite asking. Peter’s not sure he’s quite brave enough to answer, but he gives it a go anyhow.

He swallows hard, twisting his fingers into the bedsheets, watching his knuckles turn the same creamy shade as the fabric. “I didn’t think you would really want to want…me.”

Caspian reaches across the gap between them to grasp Peter’s wrist, press his thumb to the beating of Peter’s pulse against his skin, and suddenly Peter can’t help wondering why there’s so much damn space between them now. Again.

“I did,” Caspian whispers. Peter looks up at his face, and his eyes are dark and warm and steady. “I do.”

There isn’t space between them for much longer after that.

𐂂

“How long has it been?” Peter asks later, half-asleep on Caspian’s shoulder, tracing lines against the skin of his collarbone with one bitten-down nail.

Caspian muffles a yawn. It is by now very late, and he is struggling to stay awake. They both are. “Since the last dream? Six days.”

“Not a dream,” Peter corrects. “And no, I meant since your coronation. Since we left.”

“Five months.”

Peter is silent. His fingers are suddenly still.

Hesitantly, Caspian asks, “How long for you?”

Very quietly, Peter says, “Two weeks. And change.”

“Oh.”

All at once, Peter rolls off him, falling onto his back to stare up at the canopy of the bed overhead. The candle has long since burned out, rendering his expression near-inscrutable in the darkness left by the setting moon.

“Peter—” he tries.

“It’s fine,” Peter tells him, though it’s clearly not. “It’s fine, really. I just— forgot. I’d really rather not talk about it.”

So they don’t. But that doesn’t mean it goes away.

𐂂

Peter’s mark is still there in the morning. Caspian wonders if it makes him selfish that he wishes it were Peter who is here instead.

𐂂

The next time it happens, Peter points the dagger rather distractingly at Caspian in the midst of carving another line into the headboard beside the first and says, “We’re going to talk about it this time. Really.”

Caspian eyes the dagger and tries not to think of the How, the drizzling rain, and the last time Peter had a weapon pointed his direction. It wasn’t either of their best moment, by any measure, but on more than one occasion, Caspian has found himself remembering what it was like to cross blades with Peter and wishing that they might have done it under happier circumstances.

He asks, “Talk about what?”

Peter harrumphs, returning his attention and his blade to the wood. “All of this. We know we aren’t dreaming, yes, but how aren’t we dreaming? How am I here? Aren’t you curious?”

But by now, Caspian has remembered his encounter with the White Stag under the trees of Lantern Waste, and he wonders if perhaps he has the answers Peter seeks, though he’s not sure how much good they’ll be. Peter listens thoughtfully as he explains, sitting back when Caspian finishes with a furrowed brow that seems to indicate he’s at as much a loss for answers as Caspian is.

“Do you suppose that is how you came to be here?” he asks anyway, if only to fill the silence.

“It could be,” Peter admits, running a nail along the dagger’s edge. “I’ve never had much experience with wishes here.”

“All the stories say you were hunting the White Stag when you— when the Golden Age came to its end,” Caspian supplies.

Peter says, rather softly, “We were. But we never caught it, and anyway, no one had seen it in Narnia for near a hundred and twenty years by the time that happened. I don’t think anyone actually caught it since—oh, I can’t recall his name, but one of Gale’s sons. The great archer, you know. People always said there was never his equal in Narnia until Susan. And anyway, that was so long ago no one seems to remember what he wished for, much less if he got it.”

Caspian nods absently. Since recalling the Stag and all it said to him, there has been one thought he cannot shake, one fear overshadowing all the rest. Before he can think better of it, he opens his mouth and it comes tumbling out.

“Aslan,” Caspian begins, “said you were not coming back.”

Peter hesitates. “Yes.”

“Will he—” He stops. Sighs. Tries to fit the question into words that make sense. “If I did this. Brought you here. My wish, that is. Would he be angry? That I have gone against his word?”

There is a long moment of silence, wherein Caspian cannot bring himself to look at Peter. Then—

“Caspian,” Peter says, discarding the dagger in the sheets to grasp both of Caspian’s hands in his, “listen. I don’t know how this happened, strictly, or why, or if— if it’ll last. But if I learned anything in Narnia, it’s that very little happens without Aslan knowing. I don’t think I could even be here without his say-so. So no, I don’t reckon he’d be angry, especially not for something like this. It’s not as though anyone can help what they wish for, after all.”

He squeezes Caspian’s hands, and Caspian squeezes back, a little.

He recalls, “You said you would wish to be here, if you could.”

“Real,” Peter tells him, sweeping one thumb across the back of Caspian’s hand. “And you said you would have wished for this. Though I suppose you did.”

“Yes,” Caspian says, a little wonderingly, and leans forward to press his forehead into the space between Peter’s shoulder and neck. “I did.”

Real, he thinks, feeling the warmth of Peter’s skin, his hand sliding up to rest on the nape of Caspian’s neck. This is real.

It still feels like a miracle.

“Aslan has not been seen since after you left,” he says into the cradle of Peter’s shoulder, sighing at his touch in Caspian’s hair, “or I might have been able to ask him.”

He can feel more than hear Peter’s answering hum. “Yes. He comes and goes. Goes, more often. You get used to it.”

And indeed, Caspian already has.

𐂂

Life goes on, and so too do their nights together. Some are short—a handful of minutes snatched here and there, after dusk or before dawn or somewhere in between—and some last nearly the whole night through. There does not seem to be rhyme nor reason to it, or at least not one Caspian can understand. The not-dreams are not every night, either. Sometimes weeks will pass before he turns over to find Peter there, seated at the foot of Caspian’s bed.

(“Three days,” Peter will tell him, or however long it has been for him.

“Four weeks,” Caspian will reply.

And no matter how hard he tries, Peter never can quite mask the fall of his shoulders matching the length of the Narnian time that has passed.)

Peter is gone often enough to miss, always, but not so keenly as before. Still, sometimes Caspian lies awake at night, waiting, and wonders which time will be the last time he sees Peter. Wonders how long this can possibly last. He learns to take advantage of what nights they are given.

Over time, they adjust. Peter carves a new notch into the bedframe with every true visit. On lonely nights, Caspian takes to counting them, running his fingers over each slight gouge in the darkness, waiting for Peter to be there to touch instead. Come daylight, his life goes on. Narnia thrives. He tells Peter of it, sometimes, when Peter is there to tell, though not so much that it begins to worry at the edges of him Caspian knows Narnia, or leaving it, have left more than a little frayed. Peter tells him of England in turn, and of the others. How Susan’s won another prize for swimming. How their father is coming home. How Peter’s not doing so badly in school anymore, and the Professor has offered to help him study to continue his education.

He sounds more resigned to than happy for it, Caspian notices, but he chooses not to point it out. He can tell by the tightness around Peter’s eyes it would do more harm than good to say so.

He does not tell anyone of Peter’s visits, and though he hasn’t asked, he senses Peter hasn’t told anyone, either.

Somehow, Caspian can’t bring himself to mind. After all, he’s never had something to call his and his alone before. Nothing but Narnian fairytales, stories of things he never dreamed he could have or touch or meet by horn and by chance in a misty morning wood. This thing between him and Peter is perhaps the first true secret Caspian has had to cherish and to keep. He doesn’t know it, but it is the same for Peter.

𐂂

“I see the giants decided to stay a problem after all,” Peter observes, glancing around at the walls of Caspian’s tent.

“Aslan’s teeth,” Caspian swears, jumping at his sudden presence and knocking a cushion off his makeshift bed in the process.

Peter says, “Sorry,” though he doesn’t sound particularly sorry at all, merely amused. “How long—?”

“Two months,” Caspian supplies, watching Peter survey the maps of the northern hinterlands laid out upon his table, and the troop placements arrayed across them. “Four weeks of that here. They kept crossing the borders.”

“Doesn’t look like they will be for long,” Peter observes, tracing a finger along the line of the River Shribble inked neatly into the parchment. “Ten days for me. Almost failed a Latin test. Ugh. It’s been going well here, I take it?”

“Very much so,” he says, pushing himself slowly and wincingly to his feet, which is when Peter looks at him properly for the first time, catching sight of the bandages around Caspian’s left shoulder, visible under the collar of his tunic, and his brow furrows.

“You’re hurt.”

“That tends to happen in battle, yes.” This jest does not seem to allay Peter’s concern, however. He tries again, reaching for one of Peter’s hands with his good arm. “I am fine, Peter. They will heal.”

“‘They’?” Peter asks keenly, surveying Caspian for hidden wounds, of which Caspian admittedly has many, though most are hardly more than bruising from mail deflecting giants’ blows, or taking a tumble from his horse. He touches the edge of the bandages under Caspian’s collar, frown deepening. “Have you forgotten about Lucy’s cordial?”

Caspian shakes his head, a movement which renders him dizzier than he’d like to admit. “None are threatening enough to require cordial. It is better off spared for worse occasions. You taught me that.”

Peter is silent, gazing fixedly down at his fingertips, toying with the collar of Caspian’s shirt; at the blood spotting his bandages.

“Peter,” he says. “I will be fine. You needn’t worry.”

“I just wish,” Peter sighs, “I could— do something. Help.”

“You are helping.” At Peter’s skeptical look, he shakes his head, reaching to guide him a little closer by the hips. “You’re here, are you not?” Carefully, so as not to pull at any of his wounds, Caspian leans in and kisses him softly on the temple, feeling a little of the tension knotted there ease as he does. “You cannot fight every duel in my stead, you know.”

“I do,” murmurs Peter. “I do know.”

But it sounds like he wishes he still could.

Before Caspian can reassure him—or at the very least, distract him—any further, however, there comes the sound of footsteps approaching the entrance to the tent.

“Your Majesty?” calls one of the soldiers from just outside the flap. Voltinus, he thinks—a Faun. One of the field medics, likely here to check up on Caspian, and under Trumpkin’s orders, no doubt. That Dwarf is a regular mother hen. “May I enter?”

“One moment,” Caspian calls, and turns back to Peter, who regards him with raised brows. He hisses, “The cot. Under the blankets.”

Peter snorts, but obeys, and allows Caspian to move the pillows so he looks at least a little less conspicuous. The only light in the tent comes from a few candles and a half-shuttered lantern on the table, so perhaps the gloom will serve to mask his presence. Caspian moves back toward the table, bracing himself against its edge and breathing shallowly through his nose at the wave of pain so many sudden movements sparks, before calling for Voltinus to enter.

“I'm merely here to check your wounds, sire,” the Faun says, bowing slightly.

“I am fine, Voltinus,” Caspian sighs. “Thank you.”

“All due respect, Your Majesty, but Trumpkin said you would say that. I am under orders not to leave until I’m certain all is well.”

Of course, Caspian thinks, and lowers himself on to a camp stool near the table for the Faun to examine his wounds more easily—the shoulder; his bruised ribs from a giant’s foot clipping his side; a shallow scratch down one thigh where his mail caught and tore under a heavy blow. None of them are serious, though his ribs ache, and his shoulder will likely need rebandaging soon.

Voltinus offers as much, but Caspian, doing his best not to steal glances at his cot, shakes his head.

“Thank you, but I can do that myself should the need arise.”

The Faun gives him a disapproving frown before seeming to remember Caspian is his King, at which point he twists it back into an expression of vague neutrality. He’s one of the more serious Fauns Caspian has known, Voltinus—he took quickly to learning the healing trade from some of the Centaurs in the early days of their rebellion against Miraz and has taught plenty others himself since then.

“Very well.” But at the entrance to Caspian’s tent, he pauses, ears twitching, and glances back curiously at him. “Forgive me, Your Majesty, but—may I ask who you were speaking to? I thought I heard voices.”

Caspian makes a show of glancing around the tent, adapting an air of surprise. “There is no one here, Voltinus. You must have heard someone else. Tents, you know. Everything carries.” He claps his good hand against a knee. “I think I shall retire now, until morning. You may leave.”

The Faun does not seem convinced, but his expression seems to say whatever it is, he has decided he’d rather not know. “Very well, sire.”

He bows again and departs, and only once his hoofsteps have retreated outside does Caspian allow himself to relax. He hadn’t considered the lack of privacy afforded by walls of mere fabric before now. They’ll just have to be quieter, he supposes.

“You could have just told the truth,” Peter says, amused, emerging from beneath the blankets. He shakes his hair out of his eyes, but it’s still a mess, and Caspian finds himself terribly endeared.

“What,” he asks, pushing himself up from the stool and crossing to settle himself once more on the edge of the cot, “that the High King Peter whom Aslan sent out of Narnia never to return has returned, and to ravish me in my sleep, no less?”

“Oh, is that what I do?” Peter smiles at him, a little crookedly, eyes sparkling.

Lion’s mane, Caspian loves him.

He leans a little closer, ignoring the twinging in his ribs, the pull at his shoulder. “Not at the moment, it would seem.”

Peter’s eyes are on the bandages again. “Caspian—”

Caspian kisses him, long and slow and sweet, the way he has been wanting to for two months, the way he always wants to. He runs his fingers through the hairs at the nape of Peter’s neck—shorter now than when he first met him, but still as golden—and tugs, and is rewarded with a sharp inhalation, a bitten-off noise, warm fingers grasping carefully at his hips.

“You’re injured,” Peter reminds him softly when he pauses for air. He hisses in a pleased breath, eyes sliding closed and head tipping back when Caspian runs a hand teasingly down his side, noses at a tender spot below one ear.

Caspian whispers, “Then you will have to be careful.”          

And Peter is.

𐂂

Afterwards, Peter insists on rechecking Caspian’s wounds. Caspian sits on the cot while Peter kneels before him and cuts away the bandages on his shoulder and thigh, washing the wounds carefully and wrapping them in clean new cloths. He approaches it with the same single-minded determination Caspian has known him to possess in matters of war and state, but this is different, Caspian thinks, especially when Peter moves on to washing the scratches too small to need much tending, then cleaning the dirt lurking beneath his nails and on his brow, the sweat of battle that has long since dried but that he has not had time and energy enough to wash away.

There is a terrible sort of gentleness to the way Peter touches him now, when Caspian has not asked this of him, can offer nothing in return. It has been a very long time indeed since anyone was this gentle with Caspian the Tenth.

“Peter,” he manages, past the sudden and unexpected lump of his heart in his throat. “You needn’t—”

“I want to,” Peter says, wringing the cloth he’s using out and dipping it back into the basin of water an attendant left behind earlier. For the first time since he started, his eyes meet Caspian’s, steady and searching and warm. “All right?”

Caspian breathes out, more than a little shakily. It feels, just a little, as though he has swallowed a star which now sits, shining and burning and singing, behind his third and fourth ribs. He says, very softly, “All right.”

The small smile this earns him from Peter is a star all its own.

𐂂

Seeing as the camp is a temporary fixture, Peter doesn’t bother carving a mark to prove he was there come morning. He leaves plenty on Caspian himself instead—though nothing, of course, that cannot be easily hidden under armor and mail.

He does not sleep much that night. He sits up in the lantern-shadowed tent and watches Caspian sleep, breathing shallow from the pain Peter can tell he’s hiding in his ribs. He wishes he could do more. Be more.

He doesn’t realize that what he is—to Caspian—is enough.

𐂂

By late summer, the giants are beaten back, and the army’s homecoming is met with a celebration so thorough it leaves Caspian feeling as worn-out as the war. He is relieved to be going home to rest.

He does not, however, return to the castle of his forefathers, which has served since his coronation as the crown seat of Narnia. Somewhere else is finally ready and waiting. Somewhere Caspian has longed to be for, he thinks, his entire life.

𐂂

His very first night in his new chambers, he wakes to a rich summer breeze and Peter standing out on the balcony, hands braced against the rail. He does not turn as Caspian stands and crosses the room to the thrown-open doors, but instead stays looking fixedly eastward, out to sea.

“Where are we?” he asks, sounding like he already knows. Like he’s scraped raw by it.

Caspian does not ask how Peter knows he has approached. Somehow he always does. Instead, he looks at him standing there, the sea breeze in his hair, snatching at the collar of his shirt. He is shaking, Caspian realizes, and holding himself up through sheer will and an iron grip on the balustrade.

“Caspian,” Peter whispers, still not looking at him. It is as though he cannot bear to look away from the sea, the sky, the curl of the beach below. “Where are we?”

“Cair Paravel,” Caspian says, and watches a tear slip down Peter’s cheek.

“You rebuilt it?”

Caspian steps closer, slipping an arm ‘round his waist, hooking his chin over Peter’s shoulder, anchoring him, helping him stand. “We rebuilt it.”

And though Peter does not reply, the way he pries one hand from the rail to grasp and hold Caspian’s set about his waist says more than enough. They stand there for a long time, Peter at the rail, Caspian behind, pressing soft kisses into his neck.

He does not ask Peter to come to bed. This is more important.

𐂂

“You seem happier,” Susan observes the next day, brushing out her curls in front of her vanity mirror while Peter sits at the foot of her bed with a book that he’s only halfway reading, thanks to another one of his headaches that just won’t go away. They’re home for the holidays now. It’s almost Christmas, and not nearly so strained as the last one. He’s even heard their mother laugh once or twice since their father’s return.

Peter only shrugs, looking away from her searching gaze reflected back at him in the mirror. Of all of them, Susan’s always been the one who sees him clearest, he’s always thought. She’s known him almost his entire life, and he’s known her all of hers, and it’s awfully hard to hide things from people when they feel more a part of you than one of your own arms.

Sometimes he thinks about telling them. Wants to tell them. But they’re in England, not Narnia, and Peter has never been the brave one here. He can’t quite bring himself to expose his tender spots outside of Narnia, this one most of all.

“Well, whatever for, I’m glad,” Susan tells him, and nothing more.

For her, he manages a smile. It’s his first real one here in months.

“Thanks, Susan.”

And Susan says, “Anytime.”

𐂂

It takes Caspian ten days of spending nights on the shore before Peter comes again. It’s always strange to see it happen—one moment, nothing. The next, Peter, knee-deep in the surf, yelping with surprise.

“Lion’s mane,” he says, slogging his way out of the water. “Warn a chap, will you?”

But he doesn’t sound at all displeased, really. There’s a smile on his face that makes Caspian wish smiles were something one could take hold of, bottle, carry always.

“What are you doing down here in the dark?” Peter asks, coming to stand beside Caspian at the edge of the water.

Caspian only points, and Peter follows the gesture up to the glowing windows and arches of Cair Paravel sat above them on the cliffs, domes sparkling even in the starlight.

He says, simply, “I wanted you to see it.”

𐂂

Peter rubs sand out of entirely too many unlikely places for days after that.

𐂂

It’s not always good. Sometimes Peter thinks it’s a curse more than a wish, this not-quite having, not-quite losing. He can’t keep hold of it, any of it—Narnia, Caspian, the rightness he feels when he’s with both—but neither can he let it go.

Waking up in England is always the worst part. Waking up and waiting for it to start all over again—or worrying that it might already be over.

Some nights at home he fills up the bath, staring blankly at the flaking spot on the rim where the enamel has chipped away to reveal dull iron underneath, and his chest feels the same way. Some nights he climbs into it and pretends for a moment, however fleeting, that the water is not water but hands, holding him, touching him in all those unlikely tender places he aches for—ankle, elbow, the shell of his ear. Sometimes he touches himself and wishes he were touching Caspian instead. On those nights, he sinks below the surface where all is warm and quiet and the closest he can feel to safe in this world, and only then will he let himself weep, where not even he can hear it.

𐂂

“We’re building a ship for the voyage,” Caspian tells him. “Drinian believes we will be ready to sail next summer.”

“You’ll have to tell me what’s beyond the Lone Islands,” Peter says, sounding only half-awake. (Caspian suspects he hasn’t been sleeping enough of late; these visits are often near-nightly for Peter, after all. Sometimes, when he’s here, he does nothing but lie quietly with his face hidden in Caspian’s side, claiming headaches have been keeping him awake. Caspian worries for him, naturally, but doesn’t mind.) “We never made it that far.”

“Did you voyage often in your day?”

“Well,” Peter huffs, breath warm against his neck, “I didn’t, usually. Lu loved to, and Susan visited the island nations a fair few times.”

“Not fond of the sea?” Caspian teases, prodding his shoulder. Peter pinches his side without opening his eyes, and Caspian yelps.

“Not fond of spending the entire trip hung over the rail,” he corrects. “Never could get the hang of sailing.”

Caspian laughs, running his fingers down Peter’s back. “I shall be sure bring your sister’s cordial on the Dawn Treader, then. We wouldn’t want you taking ill should you visit.”

This earns him a smack on the chest, but he can feel Peter’s smile against his neck, so Caspian knows he doesn’t really mean it.

𐂂

More often than not, they keep well hidden in Caspian’s rooms—partly for privacy and preferred secrecy, and partly because Caspian hasn’t even the first idea how he would go about explaining the High King’s (albeit temporary) presence to some poor unsuspecting Narnian who might catch sight of them should they leave the sanctuary of his chambers. There are already rumors enough that Cair Paravel is haunted, its halls echoing with footsteps and laughter of years long past. It would do little good to encourage them. Tonight, however, Peter tilted his head and asked, The treasure house—it’s still here? Do you reckon we could make it down there without getting caught? There’s something I’d like to show you.

And Caspian said, Yes, because it was Peter first, and because they likely could second. There are more than a few private corridors built into this new Cair Paravel for Caspian’s personal use; he has not forgotten how such hidden passages saved his life in the castle of his forefathers, after all. They make it altogether rather easy to slip down to the restored treasure house beneath Cair Paravel’s halls, all things considered. Now Caspian watches, somewhat bemused, as Peter rummages through the jumbled chest in front of a statue that bears his name, if not his total likeness, curses under his breath with each new trinket he knocks onto the floor.

“I know it’s here somewhere,” he grumbles, dumping a shirt of mail in a heap with a goblet, a tunic, his vambraces, and a single engraved pauldron. “I saw it last time.”

“Saw what?” Caspian asks.

“Be patient, you. You’ll have to wait and see,” Peter says loftily, and then knocks a pouch of coins onto his bare foot and swears roundly. He grimaces down at the chest in consternation. “You don’t have to keep everything exactly this way. You know that, right?”

Caspian frowns. “What do you mean?”

Peter straightens to gesture at the room at large—the statues in their niches, the chests and their contents, Peter’s silverbright shield leaning against the side of his where he set it after lifting it in surprise from the top of the pile in his own, where it has lain since Caspian placed it there on his first lonely trip to the former ruins of Narnia’s crown seat. “All this. I— well, it’s not as though we’re going to be using any of it anymore. You don’t have to keep it the same as we did. I mean, this”—here, he nudges his shield with his foot—“is yours now. And these, and— I guess all of it. You don’t have to leave everything the way you found it. No one’s going to care if you want to rearrange things, or give them away, or drink out of one of Lu’s old goblets, or, I don’t know, use Susan’s bow and arrows.”

“I am not so sure your sister would care for me using her weapon,” Caspian says.

“Well, no, she’d probably be terribly particular about it,” Peter huffs. “Not that she’d know. That was a bad example. But that’s the whole point, isn’t it? We don’t live here anymore, Caspian. You do. There’s no point letting all this go to waste. None of us want that, I promise you.”

Still, his voice hitches, just slightly, as he says it, matching the hollow feeling in Caspian’s own chest.

“What if this is how I want things?” he cannot help but ask.

Now it is Peter’s turn to frown, looking searchingly at him. “Is it?”

It’s not a question Caspian knows how to answer, so he merely shrugs and directs his gaze towards Lucy’s statue instead, counting the laurel flowers crowning her carven brow.

Peter sighs but doesn’t push the issue. After a moment, he asks, “What do you know about Narnian crowns?”

Taking the abrupt change of subject in stride, Caspian pauses, searching his memory. “Very little. The first crowns came from—trees, yes?”

This earns him an approving nod from Peter.

“Supposedly, King Frank and Queen Helen’s crowns were crafted from gold and silver trees. The first Dwarfs forged them to reflect the spirit of the wearer. Once his son succeeded him as King, Frank bid the Dwarfs to reforge the crown to suit him, and it was the same for his son after him, and so on. There was a bit of a scuffle about it when Col founded Archenland, so they say, but legend has it Helen’s crown ended up as theirs because of it. That’s beside the point, of course.”

“Of course,” says Caspian. He wonders where all this is going.

“And supposedly,” Peter continues, running his fingers along the rim of the chest, which he has settled himself onto the lip of by now, “that carried on all the way ‘til the last Queen of Narnia, before the Witch invaded. I wasn’t there for any of this, obviously, but I’m told the Narnians smuggled her crown here when the tide began to turn in the war. No one ever got at it because they’d fashioned a door of the wood from the Tree of Protection after it was felled. It kept the raiders out all the way ‘til we came back to Narnia, even. My crown was apparently forged from that one.”

He sighs, burying his fingers up to the knuckle in the jumbled trinkets within the chest, brow knit into something like a frown. “It ought to be yours, now.”

Caspian startles. “Come again?”

“When we coronated you, if things had gone to tradition, you’d’ve been crowned with your own crown,” Peter says quietly, “not the Telmarine one. A Narnian crown, meant to suit you and serve you all your reign. And it should’ve been forged from mine, traditionally, only mine’s gone, and I don’t know where, because I was wearing it when we went back through the wardrobe. And so you haven’t got a proper crown, and you didn’t have a proper coronation. That’s hardly fair. So, I wanted to give you this instead.”

He withdraws his hand from the chest and holds up a ring—thick-banded, silver, set with a marquise-cut sapphire of deepest blue.

Peter says, rubbing a thumb over the gem, “It’s my coronation ring. Not a crown, exactly, but—”

“I do not mind about the crown, Peter.”

“I do,” Peter replies, leaning his temple against Caspian’s sternum when Caspian steps around discarded armor and jewels to stand beside him and slip an arm ‘round his shoulders. “Give me your hand.”

He takes Caspian’s offered hand and slips the ring onto his index finger. It fits perfectly. The metal is warm from Peter’s touch. It’s a very Peter sort of ring, Caspian thinks—simple, lovely, to the point. It’s a very Peter sort of gesture, too.

“Thank you,” he says, grasping one of Peter’s hands in both of his when he moves to drop Caspian’s, instead lifting it to his mouth to press a kiss into his palm, then his knuckles, then the back of it for good measure, just to see the way Peter tries and fails to hide his smile.

“You’re welcome,” Peter says, tipping his head back to meet Caspian’s eye in the dim golden light, and adds, a little mischievously, “my King.”

And really, no one would blame Caspian for kissing him then. Even amidst the last sparkling remnants of Narnia’s Golden Age, Caspian thinks just then Peter is perhaps the most precious of gilded things held in the vaults beneath Cair Paravel.

𐂂

Often, Peter announces himself rather loudly, in the event that Caspian is asleep. Tonight, however, Caspian only wakes to the feeling of Peter burrowing under the covers and pressing his forehead into Caspian’s shoulder just hard enough to wake him. They’ve done this enough by now that Caspian can tell Peter’s hurting without him having to say—and he does so hate to say.

“Your head?” he asks quietly, running his free hand through Peter’s hair. Peter grumbles, maybe curses, and keeps his face well hidden. “What can I do?”

A sigh, warm through his shirt. “Just this.”

And Caspian says, quietly, “All right.”

This, he can do.

𐂂

“Everyone keeps hinting at the matter of marriage,” Caspian says rather darkly, throwing himself down in one of the chairs set before the dying fire. Peter, sprawled in the other, has to swallow before he can find his voice again.

“You don’t sound very pleased.”

Caspian leans his head back, staring up at the ceiling, painted with a summer night sky in shimmering gold and blue. He sighs. “I am not yet twenty, Peter. It seems— very soon. And they are relentless.”

“Advisors are like that,” Peter says around the bittersweet twist in his chest. He looks down, digging one thumbnail beneath the other, scraping out imaginary dirt. “You’ll probably have to, though. Sooner or later. Heirs and security and such, you know.”

When he glances up again, Caspian is looking at him, eyes dark and expression inscrutable.

“You didn’t,” he points out.

“No.” But if he had—if any of them had—would they have ever left Narnia? Would Telmar have invaded? Would so many have died?

It’s like Aslan says, though. They can never know what may have been, only what is. And the truth Peter knows is that one day, Caspian will have to marry, whether he wants to or not. What he doesn’t know is if he plays a part in any of Caspian’s reluctance—and if so, whether it’s rotten of him to feel so glad.

“Would you have,” Caspian asks, “if you hadn’t left? Married, I mean.”

Digging his nail in so sharply it draws blood, Peter says, very softly, “Yes. For Narnia, I would have.”

They don’t speak of it again after that. Not that night, and not for many nights after—by either’s measure.

𐂂

Despite Caspian’s care—bringing along Lucy’s cordial; a berth just big enough for two, so long as they be either small or quite familiar—long weeks pass on the water with no sign of Peter. And then Edmund and Lucy are swept back into Narnia, and Caspian wonders if this means he won’t be seeing any of Peter this voyage at all.

Still, he is terribly glad to see them. The sharp edges of missing Narnia’s Kings and Queens have been dulled, somewhat, thanks to Peter’s inconstant presence, but they bite him often nonetheless, and for a time, those jaws are stayed—even if the newcomer Eustace is always loud and often determined to be intolerable.

“I’m so glad to see you,” Lucy tells him, wrapping him in a hug beyond the strength of her stature. “We’ve all missed you so much.”

And Caspian finds his throat is suddenly too tight to speak, so he merely nods against her cheek and embraces her in kind.

𐂂

Edmund, of course, always seems to see more than he lets on, even if he doesn’t know the whole of it.

“Peter doesn’t talk about you,” he says one night, gazing out at the rolling waters, arms crossed on the rail, “but I get the feeling that doesn’t mean what most people might think. I know he misses you, that much is obvious. He’s rubbish at hiding anything of that sort.”

He eyes Caspian knowingly, shooting his hand upon the rail a very pointed look, which means Caspian follows his gaze and remembers, Of course, he’s wearing the ring Peter gave him, the ring that used to be Peter’s, which naturally Edmund would recognize.

He adds, “I also get the feeling it’s about the same for you as well.”

Caspian swallows with some difficulty. “If I were to ask—supposing your feelings are right, of course—”

“Of course.”

“—if I were to ask what, exactly, you wanted to know,” Caspian continues, “you would say…?”

Edmund Pevensie does not smile, strictly, but there is something of a tilting upwards about the lines of his face when he claps a hand on Caspian’s shoulder and replies, “That it’s none of my business, of course. I only thought you ought to know.”

Tucking his hands into his pockets, he turns to go but stops before he’s taken more than a step or two, turning back to glance at Caspian.

He says, “That’s his coronation ring, did you know?”

Caspian says, softly, “I did. He mentioned as much when he— he gave it to me.”

Edmund raises his eyebrows, just a little. It speaks volumes, none of which Caspian can quite decipher. “Interesting.”

And then he strides away.

𐂂

He dreams of Peter often on the Dawn Treader’s voyage—his nose to Caspian’s neck, mouth against his wrist—but for once, they are never more than dreams, leaving nothing behind but Caspian and the tang of his wanting, running through him like salt in the sea.

“Did you know you talk in your sleep?” he tells Edmund absently once after a particularly restless night. He has no idea what trains are, but Edmund certainly seemed to be dreaming of them.

Edmund raises his brows in a way that reminds him quite suddenly of Susan and answers, “Did you know you do?”

𐂂

“Your desires are known to me, Son of Adam,” Aslan’s golden visage says to him from the wall of the stern cabin, and Caspian cannot meet its eye. “But it is here that your voyage must come to its end.”

All this, he thinks, all this and he is still not to see the end of the world? Not know if it truly is possible to pass beyond the edge of it to other places, other worlds, for even one glimpse, five spare minutes? All this, and Caspian cannot make one choice for himself?

But of course, he ought to know better than that. It is not a King’s duty to act in his own interests, which is perhaps all Caspian has thought of these last long weeks, gazing eastward with a foolish hope brewing painfully in his chest. Peter did not hesitate to lead his siblings out of Narnia three years prior, after all. Not when it was Aslan’s will and Narnia’s fate.

Caspian has never felt as brave as Peter, though, nor as selfless.

“What of the spell?” Caspian manages, though he knows he sounds childish, scrabbling for any way of arguing with the Lion’s word. “Someone must venture beyond the world’s end to break it.”

“That someone is not to be you,” Aslan says, and there is an edge of a growl in his voice now, metallic and strange, like a sword drawn from its sheath. Then, suddenly, it softens. Gentles. “There is work yet to be done in these lands by your hand, my son. I know what it is you hope for, but it is not your time nor your duty to pursue it.”

“Will it ever be?” he asks, because he is human and heartsick and aching.

And the Lion says, “Not yet.”

𐂂

After Miraz’s defeat, the Pevensies’ departure was so sudden and unexpected that Caspian stood dumbstruck upon the dais, Peter’s sword clutched in hand, and said nothing as they left. He has had three years to regret not bidding them a proper farewell—not embracing them while they were still there to embrace, not telling them how much they had come to mean to him while they were still there to hear—though perhaps he hadn’t realized the breadth of it until they were already gone. This time, Caspian does not repeat his past mistakes. They are the closest he has had to family for nearly as long as he can remember, and he tells Narnia’s Just and Valiant rulers as such, his hands on their shoulders before hugging them tight.

He wishes all four of them were here to hold.

He wishes even more that they could stay.

“Fair winds and bright stars,” he tells them, clasping one of Lucy’s hands and one of Edmund’s while Eustace skulks off to the boat with Reepicheep. “Be well, my friends. You will be dearly missed.”

“Fair winds and bright stars,” Lucy echoes, squeezing his hand, wiping at her eyes with the cuff of her sleeve. “We’ll miss you too.”

As they turn to go, he hesitates only a moment before catching gently at her shoulder.

“When you return to your world,” Caspian asks quietly, “will you tell your brother something for me?”

𐂂

“Caspian says hello,” is the first thing Lucy tells him breathlessly when Professor Kirke hands Peter the phone one sunny weekend in August.

He blinks, uncomprehending. “Lucy—what?”

𐂂

A month into their winter anchored at Ramandu’s island, Caspian wakes in his cabin to Peter on the edge of his berth, prodding him incessantly in the shoulder.

“Hello yourself,” are the first words Peter says to him after nearly a year apart. The second are, “Shove over, will you?”

Caspian shoves over.

“Hello,” he greets, propped up on his elbow, failing to shake his hair out of his eyes in his haste to touch Peter, wrist, shoulder, hip; to know that he’s real. Peter reaches out and does it for him, tucking it first behind one ear, then the other, in the midst of pulling his legs up onto the bed, as though it is nothing at all. As though it is not his touch Caspian has been dreaming of to nearly the edge of the world and back.

Peter huffs, rather fondly, “You already said that.”

Caspian reaches up and slides his fingers around the back of Peter’s neck, tugging him downwards, closer, warmer beneath the sheets.

“Hello,” Caspian murmurs teasingly again, and kisses him.

𐂂

Sometimes, Peter wonders if it’s wrong that he’s this happy. A week after Lucy and Edmund return from Narnia, Peter visits them briefly at their aunt and uncle’s. They’ve both put on a brave face about it, he can tell, but Edmund is graver than usual, and sometimes, when Lucy sits beside him and drops her head onto his shoulder, Peter can feel her tears through the collar of his shirt.

“We knew it was coming,” Edmund tells him in confidence. “Since last time, we’ve known it would happen, I think. But I don’t think I realized how much I was going to miss it. It sneaks up on you. I’m not sure how you bear it.”

Peter picks at his thumbnail and thinks about telling him the truth, but the words stick in his throat in one great wad. In the end, he sits with his shoulder pressing into his brother’s and says, “I know,” and, “I’m sorry.”

There’s nothing else to say.

𐂂

“You didn’t say anything about giving him your coronation ring,” Edmund says later from one of the wobbly kitchen chairs, and Peter freezes in the midst of making tea.

He remembers, belatedly, that giving someone a ring means a very different thing in England than in Narnia, which is the sort of thing Peter’s always forgotten and Edmund tends to remember, and cringes at the kettle before him on the burner. The kettle, of course, makes no reply.

“No,” Peter agrees, because that, at least, is the truth. “It didn’t seem worth mentioning.”

Not that it was his only reason for not saying anything, of course. He can feel Edmund scrutinizing him from the table, as though he’s weighing if it’s a matter worth pressing. Peter hopes it’s not. He’s never been a very good liar, a fact Edmund knows perfectly well.

“We didn’t have a crown to give, if you recall,” Peter adds, pulling cups out of the cabinet, wondering if he’s just digging himself into a deeper hole. “And it’s not as though we’ve got any use for anything left there anymore. It seemed like a decent enough compromise.”

Finally, Edmund says, with a forced sort of lightness, but no less sharp, “It’s just very generous of you, is all. Your sword, your ring, your kingdom…is there anything you didn’t give him?”

Sometimes, Peter asks himself the same thing.

𐂂

“How long are we going to do this?” Peter asks. The Dawn Treader’s voyage is long since over, and Caspian has returned to Cair Paravel alongside the remaining lost lords and the daughter, so he tells Peter, of a retired star. Things are stable. Narnia is thriving. Still, Peter watches Caspian sometimes—his newfound surety, the set of his shoulders, the length of his stride—and wonders how much longer this can go on: Caspian living, Peter…not.

It has been nearly six years for Caspian. Not even two for Peter.

Caspian frowns where he leans against the balcony rail. “What do you mean?”

“This,” Peter says, gesturing vaguely between them. “Us. You can’t live a life like this, waiting for something that’s never going to come.”

“And what if I want to?” Caspian asks, stepping closer, eyes flashing with that old familiar stubbornness. He has changed, grown, but he is also still the prince who crashed sword first into Peter in the wood, headstrong as anything.

Peter swallows. “You shouldn’t.”

“But I do,” Caspian replies softly, reaching out and weaving his fingers through Peter’s hair so that Peter cannot help but shiver, just a bit. It is still a wonder, being touched like this. Being held. With his other hand, Caspian cradles his jaw, thumbs the line of it, the arch of his cheek. “This was my wish, remember?”

As though Peter could ever forget.

𐂂

(Later, in the darkness, Peter whispers, “What happens when you don’t want this anymore?”

Caspian breathes out. “What makes you think I will not?”

There is no light by which to make out Peter’s face, but Caspian can feel the tense line of him stretched out stiffly in the dark, hands fisted atop his stomach.

He says, “People change.”

Caspian doesn’t have an answer for that. In the silence, he can hear, very faintly, the rush of the waves far below his chambers, and much closer, the unsteady hitch of Peter’s breathing.

“Just— just promise me you’re living a life outside of this,” Peter continues threadily at last. “Outside of me.”

This, Caspian can do.

When he slips his hand over one of Peter’s, his clenched fist smooths open easily, allowing Caspian to press their palms together, twine their fingers.

“I do,” he murmurs. “I am. And I promise you that I want this, too. I swear it on my life. But— if you do not—”

“I do.” Peter breathes out shakily, fingers tightening around Caspian’s. “I do want it.”

And Caspian is glad.)

𐂂

The time, Peter thinks, is the worst of it—watching it fly by for Caspian while it merely trickles for him. No time at all for Peter was a year-long voyage for Caspian. Days are weeks; months are years, and Caspian wears those years well—so well that the sight of him lodges in Peter’s throat like a stone and stays there long after he wakes—but often he can’t help but wonder how many of those years are left.

Sometimes, he lies awake at night, pinching himself when his eyelids begin to droop, because some part of him (a part the size of his fist, beating frantically behind his ribs) doesn’t want this to be the time he wakes and finds Caspian ancient, dying, dead.

How is it going to end? he wonders. He wants to scream it, sometimes, and he also wishes it never would. But it will, one way or another, because everything ends, as everyone knows, perhaps Peter Pevensie most of all. Life is nothing if not a thousand different endings to a thousand different things.

LIving is just another way of leaving, and Peter’s not so sure how much more he can take.

𐂂

Caspian marries some years after Lucy and Edmund’s last trip to Narnia, to Liliandil, the daughter of the star he met on his voyage east. She returned to Narnia with him, wishing to see the world and the west beyond her father’s isolated island. Since then, she and Caspian have become the fastest of friends. Peter hasn’t met her himself, but he has heard of her for years now, and he knows if Caspian cares for her, then she can be nothing short of good.

She knows of him, and he of her, and he imagines if it’s not the strangest situation in history, it must at least come very close.

He knows they are friends, the two of them, and very dear ones at that. When she first chose to venture west when the Dawn Treader returned to Narnia, he was glad to know Caspian would not be so alone, and this conviction still stands. He doesn’t press to know if there is anything other than friendship between them—it doesn’t really matter, in the end. Marriage in Narnia is quite different than in England. Susan never wanted to marry for love in their time, and if Peter had, it would have been for Narnia more than anything. But even if it isn’t like that, Peter finds he wouldn’t mind it. Caspian, he thinks, has the sort of heart he can’t see belonging to only one thing, place, or person. He’s like Lucy that way. Like Narnia.

Still, it is strange to think of him as someone’s husband, though Peter has little doubt he will be a good one.

He gives his blessing when Caspian asks, though, It hardly matters, he tells Caspian, and Caspian kisses his palm and tells him, It matters to me.

The first night after the marriage when Peter opens his eyes and finds himself in Cair Paravel again, he sees Caspian asleep with no one beside him. He thinks, momentarily, of waking him, but cannot help but recall how tired Caspian has seemed of late, embroiled in trade negotiations with Calormen, which has been encroaching upon the Lone Islands again. He looks peaceful now. At rest. Peter doesn’t want to take that from him.

He watches Caspian sleep for a time, smoothing a stray lock of hair from his face, and then spends a while on the balcony, watching the sky and the sea. Overhead, the stars are dancing. One winks repeatedly at him. Peter has an idea he might know who it is. He nods at it. It twinkles one last time before returning to its shining, and Peter to his contemplation of the waves.

𐂂

(At dawn, Caspian wakes to the ghost of a kiss on his brow and a new mark at the end of the dozens of others scored into the headboard of the bed. Across the room, Liliandil steps down off the windowsill with liquid grace and tells him, He didn’t want to wake you, but he stayed the whole night through.)

𐂂

“I wonder how long it’s been in Narnia by now,” Lucy wonders, chin in hand, over breakfast near the end of summer.

Peter thinks to himself: Eight years. He stares down at his copy of The Iliad, lent to him from the remnants of the Professor’s much diminished library, and chews his cheek.

Lucy adds thoughtfully, “Or if Caspian’s married yet.”

“I imagine he has,” Peter says, gazing fixedly at his book, though he’s read the same line thrice in as many minutes without comprehending even half of the words. Last night, he lay with his head on Caspian’s chest, feeling the rumble of his voice as he explained how the marriage has appeased the remaining Telmarine lords as well as his advisors, but he thinks sometimes Liliandil might have been happier elsewhere, instead of tying herself to Caspian and to Narnia.

(“She spends what nights she can in the sky among her people,” Caspian had sighed, “but she is only mostly star, and Narnia calls her home come morning. I think she would stay there forever if she could.”

Peter had closed his eyes and thought he understood her, if even a little. That they weren’t so different after all.)

“He didn’t seem particularly inclined when we were there,” Edmund says, and out of the corner of his eye, Peter can see his brother looking at him.

“Good of the kingdom,” he returns, flipping the page. He pretends not to notice them watching, but it’s a long time until they look away.

𐂂

“Still?” Peter can’t help asking, thumbing the arch of Caspian’s cheekbone. Caspian leans into the touch. Smiles.

“Still.”

𐂂

He is startled to find Liliandil there when he next opens his eyes in Caspian’s rooms. Peter freezes, feeling oddly as though he has been caught red-handed, though nothing about what he’s doing, about him and Caspian, is wrong or unknown or unwelcome to her.

But that is not the only reason he stills.

He has never seen the daughter of Ramandu in earnest, and here in the half-dark of the dying fire, he finds that she is truly lovely, though there is something not quite human about the angles of her face. She is glowing, almost, her hair more silver-white than blonde, though he notices she also looks tired.

Peter does not have to ask how long it has been. Not this time. For in her arms is a bundle, which she hands to him gently but readily when she approaches, and Peter’s arms remember cradling Susan, red-faced; Lucy, babbling, like it was yesterday.

“His name is Rilian,” she tells him, smiling, hand on his forearm. “It means bold.”

𐂂

He keeps in touch with Professor Kirke when he starts university—perhaps more than he did before. It’s strange and a little lonely, and he has to find ways to make the days feel less empty compared to the nights, which are either spent with Caspian or dreaming of him. Sometimes, on Sundays or holidays, they meet to talk, have tea, discuss the books he’s lent Peter, what Peter’s learning in school. There are other things they talk of, too, things Peter wouldn’t or maybe can’t talk about with anyone else. Things the Professor understands, because they’re the same, him and Peter, in a lot of ways. Sometimes they don’t talk about Narnia, and sometimes they do, and Peter’s never quite sure which is worse.

“What do you do,” he asks quietly one rainy Sunday afternoon, “when you outlive someone you love?”

Last night, he watched Caspian sleep in the moonlight, traced the lines that years of life and laughter are beginning to etch around his eyes. Time is different for him. Passing, and faster than before.

“What else?” asks the Professor, smiling rather sadly. “You keep loving them.”

𐂂

When Peter finds him in the How the warm spring night after Liliandil’s pyre returned what remained of his wife to the sky, he does not ask Caspian what happened. Perhaps he doesn’t need to.

Instead, he settles atop the Stone Table beside him, wrapping his arms around Caspian and holding him as he weeps.

It’s difficult to tell in the dimness, but he thinks Peter might be weeping, too.

𐂂

“What can I do?” Peter asks.

“Please,” he whispers, face hidden in the curve of Peter’s neck. It has been nine days since his son vanished without a trace or a hope. A month since Liliandil died. Six since the last time he saw Peter without grief hanging over everything like a storm about to break. “Just—this. Please.”

Peter pulls him closer, close as two bodies can be without melding into one.

“Of course,” he breathes against Caspian’s temple. He slides a hand soothingly along Caspian’s bare back, and Caspian does not, cannot forget—but for a time, the hurt lessens. The pain is bearable; the burden shared.

𐂂

Years pass—weeks or maybe months for Peter, but Caspian looks at him sometimes and thinks, Yes; sees in bits and pieces hints of the King immortalized in relief and storybook, etching and weave reflected there. To someone who does not know him, Peter Pevensie might seem ageless, untouched by time—existing outside of it, perhaps.

But Caspian is not someone.

Caspian is also not the young man he used to be. He is tired. Stretched, in a word, from years and losses alike. Sometimes, when he glimpses himself in mirrors, the face looking back at him is an echo of the flashes he used to see in Peter’s eyes there beneath the How. (He wonders if Peter still looks that way when Caspian isn’t there to see him, or if he’s merely learned to hide it better than before.) He doesn’t know how much emptier he would feel without their scattered nights together. Often, he drifts into sleep with his fingers set against the marks Peter still carves into the frame of his bed and wonders how much longer he can hold onto this last kindness.

“You should not waste the whole of your life on me,” he tells Peter on one of his worse nights. It has been eight years since Rilian vanished, and too many good people have vanished themselves in search of him. Caspian banned any others from questing after him three days prior, and it felt—still feels—as though he was driving a knife into his own heart.

Peter mutters something that sounds like pot, kettle, but does not rise to Caspian’s bait. “Haven’t we had this conversation before?”

“That was before,” Caspian sighs. Before they understood the scope of what they were doing, were living. Before his wife and dearest friend in Narnia died without him there. Before Rilian vanished, taking what feels like all of Caspian’s best parts with him. Caspian does not have very much left to lose. Perhaps it would be kinder if he had nothing left at all.

“If you still kept that knife under your pillow, I’d threaten you with it.”

“You wouldn’t.”

Peter sighs. “Fine, I’d think about threatening you with it. And you still ought to keep it there, if you ask me. It’s easier to get to than a sword if something happens.”

Caspian hardly needs a sword, though, or a knife—not when he has Peter. He does not have a chance to say so, however, because in the moonlight, Peter frowns down at him concernedly, not unlike how Lucy used to glance at him aboard the Dawn Treader, in those days when Caspian sidestepped discussing Peter too closely for fear of giving his only secret away. He is somehow more lovely than the day they first met. Caspian thinks it is very likely he will only grow lovelier yet, and that one day Caspian will not be there to see it.

“It’s not wasting, you idiot,” Peter tells him with such conviction and tenderness as to leave Caspian breathless. “It’s not. Stop trying to chase me off when we both know”—here, he swallows, looks away; he’s always had more trouble saying things outright than Caspian—“I want to be here. With you. All right?”

(This is not just Caspian’s wish anymore, after all. It never really was.)

And Caspian says, quietly, “All right.”

𐂂

In the later years of King Caspian’s reign, ever more Narnians grow to believe Cair Paravel to be haunted. There are whispered legends that the ghost of the High King Peter walks the halls and sits up at night beside their aging—perhaps, though they cannot bring themselves to say it, dying—King, waiting to guide him to Aslan’s country.

“Nonsense,” the older ones, the ones who remember the War of Deliverance and Aslan’s door in the air insist. “The High King lives. He can no more be a ghost than Aslan.”

But the legends remain, and when Caspian catches wind of them, he only smiles faintly and turns away. That night, a lone patrolling guard—a Leopard—swears it hears the sound of someone else’s laughter drifting from his chambers. That it scents something of another world.

𐂂

Caspian wakes at the sensation of the dip of the bed, warm skin, an arm draping over his waist.

“Still?” he finds himself asking, turning his face into Peter’s hair as he fits his head into the curve of Caspian’s shoulder, nosing at the crook of his neck. He feels more than sees Peter’s answering smile against his skin.

“Still.”

𐂂

“I sail for Terebinthia tomorrow,” Caspian says into the darkness of a mid-autumn night. The weather is still fair enough to sleep with the windows open, but there is a taste of frost on the air, a prelude to the winter to come.

Caspian does not say that he does not think he will return from this voyage, that he, too, is feeling his winter years tighten their grip—but he doesn’t have to. Peter hears it all the same. He sees it. He feels it in the way Caspian holds himself now, as though he believes he might shake apart at any moment. As though almost everything hurts.

(Peter wonders if this is how the gods felt in all those Greek stories the Professor told him, slowly watching their mortal lovers die. Caspian cannot walk across the Great Hall end to end unassisted. Peter still looks nineteen. Sometimes, he wonders why the gods bothered, but then Caspian says his name, tender as ever, looks at him the same and sets a hand to his cheek, his eyes and smile unchanged and lovely and true, and Peter understands intimately why such legends are things that have never gone away.)

He twines his fingers with Caspian’s beneath the covers, unable to swallow down the fear that this is the last time he will do so. Somehow, it’s Peter who is shaking between them.

“Fair winds and bright stars,” Peter whispers, though he’s never thought to ask if that’s still the proper Narnian blessing over travelers. He wants to say, Come back to me, but fears that it would be a cruelty to ask him that. To make him swear.

Caspian lifts their joined hands, presses a kiss into the back of Peter’s.

It is a terrible thing, Peter finds, missing someone who isn’t yet gone, but knowing they will be soon.

“Am I doing,” Caspian wonders, “the right thing?”

Peter squeezes his hand gently. “You’re doing the only thing you can. That’s as much the right thing as any.”

Caspian is quiet long enough that Peter wonders if he’s drifted off, but then all at once he says, “Peter.”

“Yes?”

There is a long moment of hesitation, and then Caspian asks, lowly, “Do you think— do you think Rilian still lives?”

Peter sighs. “Aslan willing.”

“And if Aslan is not?”

He remembers what the Professor told him when he asked about outliving those you love, recalls the distant look that came into his eye when they told him, years ago, about how many years had passed in Narnia since Frank and Helen's day; since Fledge last flew the skies: You keep loving them. You keep hoping they’ll come back. That you’ll see them again, wherever and whenever and however that may so be.

He says, softly, “I don’t know.”

Does anyone?

The silence falls deep and still as a well after that, until Peter eventually realizes that at one point or another Caspian has fallen asleep. Peter curls inwards, holds him close until he, too, sleeps. He does not dream.

When he wakes—cold and alone in his tiny Oxford flat—his pillow is damp, his cheeks still tacky with drying tears. They’ve had so much more time than they might have, and yet he can’t help but hide his face in the covers and wish they could have had more.

𐂂

The voyage that is to be Caspian’s last could not be more different from his first. He has been ill for some time, but it has worsened of late with the slow change in the weather, the inevitable creep towards hoarfrost and hibernation. He spends most of it confined to his cabin, alone, remembering brighter days of summer sailing—chess with Reepicheep, fencing with Edmund, lying tangled with Peter in his berth, Rilian’s first delighted voyage to the Seven Isles. He has none of those now, and the winter is mild enough, but not so mild as to allow him to throw open the windows and let in the sea breeze like he craves.

He watches the pale winter light wavering across the walls of his stateroom and wonders when, exactly, he started hoping for an end rather than merely expecting it.

As they sit in a pocket of calm off Galma’s southern coast, stretching just long enough the captain tells him they may think of putting the men at oars, Caspian slips into an uneasy sleep. When he wakes, Aslan fills the cabin, larger and more golden than ever before.

He sets his cool, dry nose against Caspian’s fingers, breath warming his chilled and shaking hand so that, just for a moment, Caspian feels himself again, and says, “Go home, King of Narnia. Your son awaits.”

By morning, the winds have risen again, and they set sail westward for Cair Paravel, every Narnian aboard brewing with quiet and terrible hope that what the King said is true. That their Prince has come home at last, and that perhaps this homecoming will be what restores the King and his health.

What they do not know is this: before Aslan departed, leaving only the sweet scent of greater worlds in his wake, he leaned very close, so close that his whiskers danced across Caspian’s face, to press a lion’s kiss to his brow and rumble gently, “Soon, dear one. Very soon.”

They do not know their King is merely waiting for the right moment to leave them.

Or perhaps they do know, but do not want to. Perhaps they cannot face it. Not in all this grief.

𐂂

The last thing Caspian sees in Narnia is his son’s tearful smile.

“Be well,” he tells him, caressing Rilian's cheek, unmarred by the years that have passed since his vanishing. With a distant and familiar music on the wind that perhaps only he can hear, Caspian X, Caspian the Seafarer—Caspian, Narnia’s deliverer-King, breathes his last.

And then he wakes up.

𐂂

“Tell me,” says Aslan, once Caspian, still marveling at the strength and the newness and life that he feels after so long, has embraced Eustace and greeted the newcomer Jill, “what it is that you wish for, my son.”

And Caspian hesitates, for the forwardness of the question after so many years and delays and not yets renders him unsteady, colt-legged. Almost afraid. He can feel the children’s curious gazes boring into him yet.

“I was once told men do not choose what they wish for,” he hedges.

Aslan’s gaze takes on a quiet, merry sort of gleam, as though he is laughing at some secret jest. “And who do you suppose it was who told you that?”

Caspian blinks. “Sir?”

He blinks again, and suddenly before him is a great white stag, the Stag, with the same massive antlers, the same golden eyes. Aslan’s eyes. Of course. He wonders now how it was he didn’t recognize them back then.

“You see now,” says Aslan, himself again in a twinkling, in a flash of sunlight upon the water, and Caspian does. “I ask again, my faithful King of Narnia: for what have you wished these many years?”

And there is, of course, little to gain in lying to Aslan—and everything to lose.

“For Peter,” Caspian replies, drawing himself up, back into the posture of a King he has kept these many years; a posture he learned more from Peter than any royal tutor. “For more time. A chance to be with him.”

“...I think I need to sit down,” mutters Eustace behind him. He can hear a shushing, then a scuffle, as though someone (Jill) has stomped on someone else’s (Eustace’s) foot. Aslan seems amused, but merely twitches the tip of his tufted tail across the grass. It is greener than any grass Caspian has ever known. Everything here is somehow more than what it is. The truest version, perhaps. And yet Caspian himself feels—pale, somehow. Hollowed. As though he is still waiting to wake up.

Caspian adds, softer, “Was that wrong?”

Aslan folds his ears back, though not angrily, Caspian thinks. “Why would it be?”

“You sent him away. You said he wasn’t coming back.”

“And I allowed you your nights together all these years,” the Lion answers mildly. “You have both done as I have asked, even when you wanted otherwise. It was not wrong to want it then, and it is not wrong to want it now. You cannot want wrong things anymore, now that you have died, dear one.”

Caspian looks away, pain lancing his chest. “But I am still dead.”

And Aslan tips his great shaggy head to one side and says, simply, “In Narnia.”

He cannot dare to hope. Not now. Not after so long. After death itself. He closes his eyes, knots his fingers together behind his back, and tries to remember how to breathe. It is harder than it has ever been before. His heart is a stone in his throat, lodged deep.

“Son of Adam,” says the Lion tenderly, “will you not look at me?”

Caspian looks at him. There is more love in his gaze than Caspian knows what to do with.

“Would it startle you to know that my High King has a wish of his own?” Aslan asks.

And again, Caspian manages, “Sir?”

“You wished for more time together. For a chance at that. And now Peter wishes for that same chance. For a life.” Aslan studies him, gaze steady and golden and wise. “Would you live another for him?”

Caspian thinks he would do many things for Peter Pevensie. Many things indeed. He manages a nod, hope burning up the back of his throat, his eyes, and the Lion looks at him and hums.

“Tell me. Have your desires not changed, my son?” Aslan asks, as though he already knows Caspian’s answer. It is very likely he does.

Caspian considers this—how best to answer. It is not so easy a question as one might think. “No,” he says. “They have. But—”

But not in a way so as to become unrecognizable. They have changed the same way Caspian has: growing, maturing, deepening. To live and to love is to change, after all. Things that cannot do that stagnate and stall. They die out. Caspian’s desires have not died, not even when he himself has. It is true that he does not want things in the same frantic, scrabbling way he did as a youth, one who had an abundance of time and yet was still so desperate for more of it. He wanted a chance back then, yes—a chance to learn. To see if there was something between them, or ever could be. But he knows now. He’s seen it, held it, slept beside it so many nights across the whole of his life. He does not want that same chance anymore. He still wants one, wants more time—but not like that.

He wants time to live. To be, however that may look, and for however long, and to whatever end. He would hope, of course, that it may be a good one, but here is something Caspian has learned: most happy endings are not endings at all but rather lives well-spent in getting there. He has not considered any moment of his spent with Peter wasted.

“It is difficult to explain,” he settles on at last.

“Yes. I understand,” replies the Lion, and meeting his gaze, Caspian believes him. He paws at the ground, claws raking through the grass and exposing the rich loam beneath, the smell of what Caspian can only describe as life bursting up out of it. With a shake of his mane, the Lion rises from his haunches to his full height, and behind Caspian, Jill lets out a quiet exhale of, “I say.”

Caspian had nearly forgotten the two of them were still there. He spares a glance over his shoulder at Eustace, meets his gaze. He seems surprised, a little embarrassed, perhaps, with ears that have gone red much as Peter’s do when he’s flustered, but he does not seem angry, nor condemning—more as though he has been caught eavesdropping than anything else. Jill seems a bit lost, but then, Caspian has never met her before just now, and she seems quite young. He hasn’t any idea if she even knows who Peter is, much less the breadth of his history with Narnia, or with Caspian himself.

“Now, children, it is nearly time for you to go back to your own world,” Aslan tells them, and then turns to Caspian. “And I shall send you on your way. But first, this one has some unfinished business to attend to.”

Caspian cannot help himself anymore. He hopes—unreservedly.

“Your wish brought Peter to your side all these years,” continues the Lion. “I think it is time you went to him, if you are still so inclined.”

“Always,” Caspian says firmly, and means it.

Aslan rumbles deep in his chest, somewhere between a growl and a hum of approval. “Then feel my breath, my son, and go with my blessing.”

“For how long—?” Caspian stumbles to ask as Aslan opens his great mouth, and he swears the Lion is laughing as his sweet breath rushes over Caspian, stripping the far green country all around away.

I said, are the last things he hears in Aslan’s country for a long, long time yet, he wishes for a life, did I not?

And then, at long last, Caspian ventures beyond the edge of the world, and into another one entirely.

𐂂

His first impression of England is that it is rather dull and colorless, though perhaps everything might seem as such after Aslan’s own country. He finds himself beside a window in a small room, gazing out at the grey sky, grey streets, grey people hurrying to and fro upon them under a sleeting grey rain. Caspian is fascinated by the shape of the buildings, the strange horseless carts rolling and growling upon the stones, but ultimately turns away—there will be time enough to look later, after all.

Time is something they have, now, at long last. Caspian is almost afraid to let himself believe it.

The room is cramped and a little bit of a mess, which makes him smile. Jumbled books and papers occupy the windowsill and the desktop, and a surcoat is slung haphazardly over the back of a chair. There are splashes of color tucked here and there, unlike the world outside: a half-empty teacup, patterned with apples and acorns; a fraying red scarf; a painting (in Lucy’s hand, he thinks) of what appears to be the Dawn Treader tacked up on a wall. None of this is why Caspian is here, of course, and none hold his attention very long once he turns it to the bed in the corner and its occupant. Peter is asleep, still, curled on his side around his pillow. By the hour and the way he has his face half shoved into the fabric, Caspian would guess he sleeps to escape another of his drawn-out headaches he still often complains of.

Not much time seems to have passed since Caspian last saw him, held him, woke in the night to feel his tears slip down Caspian’s neck. It makes sense—by Eustace’s reckoning, it has been only a handful of months between his and his cousins’ voyage with Caspian on the Dawn Treader and his return to Narnia with Jill. Strange to think of how little of England’s time most of Caspian’s life has taken up.

Peter looks tired, he notes. Rumpled. There are shadows beneath his eyes, a furrow between his brows, even in sleep. It smooths, just a little, when Caspian reaches out to brush the tangled hair back from his face, but he doesn’t stir, and Caspian does not seek to wake him. Not yet.

Instead, he settles carefully onto the bed beside him, atop the covers, and finds that Peter turns into his touch even in sleep.