Work Text:
You want to know how the story ends? Imagine a garden and boy and his dog and a summer that lasts forever, imagine a trainer with laces untied kicking a ball…
Oh, you want the other ending.
The ending after the ending. The one after a bunch of cruise directors find their premiums going up for no reason they can remember, the one after the rainforests grow in glory across their old homes, after a book doesn’t get read and an angel and a demon move into a cottage in the South Downs.
It’s a boring one, I’ll warn you. No magic. (What a miracle human life is, that we can get something as magnificent as boredom, as wonderful as uninteresting times.)
You still want it?
Fine.
It’s a long one. (It’s a lifetime’s one.)
Imagine a group of kids who go off to secondary school a few weeks after the world doesn’t end. Still with childhood’s dirt on their hands and stickers on their lunchboxes, still half mad with dreams and imagination. Normal kids. The most normal kids that there ever was.
Kids who remember the end of the world, somehow, and an angel and a demon and a handful of humans. And how a dog sometimes looks different in different lights, and how the computers really did turn on their people, and how make believe made real.
Imagine that they don’t talk about it.
Did you want the story of how they stayed best friends forever? That’s too long a one to tell, and besides it isn’t true. Not like that, not like the storybooks tell you. Even the Fellowship of the Ring broke up.
But they never had any other friends like they had when they were eleven. Did you? Did anyone?
Brian left.
Wensley got a scholarship.
Pepper went into an apprenticeship.
Adam stayed. Someone had to look after Tadfield, after all.
Eighteen, a coming of age party for one of them. They all come home. They always come home in the end, Tadfield calling them. Conversations in the dark that went on til dawn. Did you remember - yes, I remember - let’s not talk about that.
Twenty one, and they come home. Thirties and they’ve kids of their own, a couple of them. They bring them home. Forties and Adam’s in politics now, and Wensleydale’s making the banks work better and Pepper’s forcing UN states to listen to each other before they push the buttons and Brian’s dragging the water companies through the literal mud and sewage to make them behave and… they still come home, sometimes.
Still don’t talk about it.
Fifties and it’s starting to work.
Sometimes, they’re advisors for Adam now. He’s in Downing Street. They’re all over the place. They’re saving the world, a day at a time. They never do talk about it.
Imagine them happy. Ever after.
(Don’t think about the dreams, about the memories, about the more things in Heaven and Earth. Don’t think about the Pevensies searching for Narnia, about the horns echoing golden from Faeryland, about the mountains calling to an old Hobbit in the Shire, about I Must Go Down To the Sea Again. Tell yourself they were content with what they had.)
That’s a better ending than most of us will ever have, after all.