Archive of Our Own

“the entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell. / unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time.”

—“litany in which certain things are crossed out”, richard siken

𑣿

The sirens are going off again. He hears them the moment they start—not because they woke him, but because Caspian sleeps so poorly these days. Perhaps even before that. First, there were his stolen nights with Cornelius, learning secret histories and hopes. Then, his uncle’s soldiers, a hail of bolts in the dark. And now the sirens.

The sirens, and the things that haunt his dreams: blood in his mouth, across his palms, staining the rough-hewn stone before Aslan’s collapsing How. The sweat and the steel and the screams of the dying. Promise me. Please.

An explosion echoes distantly. It sounds both nothing and everything like the projectiles from the Telmarine trebuchets raining down upon them, stone on unforgiving stone. In the bed across the room, Edmund comes awake in a rush.

“Peter,” he says. Then nothing. Caspian catches the gleam of his eyes in the dark as he looks at Caspian, then away. The ensuing silence is brief but heavy with the moment that he comes fully awake. That he remembers.

Caspian doesn’t say anything. What would be the point?

Instead, he tosses Edmund the torch from the nightstand (signal flashes, wind on his face, his uncle’s sneer in the torchlight), slips on a robe that doesn’t quite fit (morning mist, sunlight on sword edge, the sideways slip of a tunic over collarbone, overlarge) and goes to fetch the others.

In the shelter, Helen Pevensie cannot meet his eye, even as Lucy folds Caspian’s hand into hers and squeezes. Caspian turns his face into the collar of the robe and tries not to notice it doesn’t smell like its previous owner anymore.

𑣿

In truth, Caspian remembers very little of how it is they came to be in England. The feelings remain more than anything—impressions of blood and sweat and burning eyes; scrabbling through blackberry thickets with raw hands and aching feet; lying awake every night straining to hear the tell-tale sounds of Telmarine soldiers creeping up through the brambles to kill them in their sleep. The finer points tend to get lost after days of exhaustion and rough travel, of Susan, white-faced and silent, of Lucy sleeping with her face turned into Edmund’s chest to muffle her screams of Peter’s name when she woke.

Mostly, Caspian can recall thinking: I should not be here. And then they scrambled their way through the bottleneck of a ravine one moment and came out in a tiled, rounded hall the next, one full of noise and dirty light and people, and the feeling only grew.

It was overwhelming at first. The people, the smells, the echoing rush of it all washing over Caspian as he stood there and stared down at his strange garb, at how clean he’d become, at the sudden lack of days-old blood clotted beneath his nails. As a very small child, he used to have nightmares about the sea, the tide, the waves sweeping him away from the shore and closing up over his head. This felt, he thought, like that. Like drowning. Like being a child again.

Susan had caught his eye over Lucy’s head, then, as though she were looking to him for guidance, but Caspian had none. He was lost. A stranger in a strange land. And anyway, her gaze dipped past him after a moment, sweeping, searching—but not finding. Never finding.

Not anymore.

His collar kept chafing. That’s what he remembers best (or perhaps least painfully) from that first day in the Underground, as he later knows it to be called. Later, Caspian, once called Tenth, knows quite a lot of things about England. That day, all he knew was it felt like he was choking, drowning, dying, standing there in another world, when once he might’ve dreamed to see it.

But it wasn’t Caspian who was dying. Who was already dead.

“What do we do now?” Edmund had asked, dull and distant, hand hovering at the now-empty spot at his hip.

And Susan drew herself up, weary and hollow-eyed but somehow still terribly regal, and said, “There’s nothing for it. We’ve got to go home.”

So they did.

𑣿

(“What are we going to tell Mum?” Lucy asks, very softly, as they walk along a damp grey street. She’s taken Caspian’s hand in hers, perhaps as much for his benefit as her own, and Caspian is grateful, even though she grips it tight enough to hurt. It’s not entirely forgiveness, but it’s something. It’s more than they had before.

He’d forgotten they have a mother. They never did in the old stories. To Caspian (fatherless, motherless, so very alone) that hadn’t really mattered.

He glances over at Susan, sees her swallow, set her jaw. Outwardly, her expression is calm, if a little pensive. Outwardly, to look at her, you’d think nothing happened.

Susan says, flatly, “What we have to.”

Last night, Caspian saw her slip away when she thought everyone else was asleep. He heard the heaving sobs, the retching deeper in the thicket. Even now, her voice is still strained from weeping, her eyes shadowed with grief.

Caspian said nothing then, just as he says nothing now. He’s not even supposed to be here, after all, wherever here really is. He shouldn’t be anywhere at all.

But they keep him close, they three, even after everything. They bring him home. It’s unclear if that’s a kindness.)

𑣿

The worst part is that Peter won the duel. He won it.

More than once, it seemed he wouldn’t. More than once, he went down hard upon the stone, rolled away from a mighty downward swing with a clattering of armor that rattled like Caspian’s heart in his chest. He carried his shield awkwardly even after Edmund set his shoulder, moved with less grace than urgency to dodge and deflect Miraz’s blows. There was one thrust that sent Caspian’s innards reeling up towards his mouth, that connected, shoved; that surely, he thought, met flesh, and pierced. But then Peter slipped backwards, sideways, momentarily out of range of another strike. Then he hefted his shield and shook a hank of sweat-matted hair from his brow and met Miraz blow for deadly blow, so it couldn’t’ve been so bad, really, Caspian thought.

Once Miraz was on his knees and Peter safely aside, the sword pressed from his palm to Caspian’s before the assembled armies, well, Caspian rather forgot about everything else. Even now, he’s not sure if things might’ve been different if he hadn’t.

Afterwards, when the army at their back was roaring so loudly Caspian couldn’t hear much of anything at all, just as his uncle had begun to limp away, furious and soundly defeated, it really seemed they’d done it. Peter caught his gaze as he turned back to the Narnian side and smiled—quiet, small, but steady. Warm. Caspian felt a lurch in his stomach, then; had half a thought: Oh?

In that moment, he’d thought that things might turn out all right after all. That they’d done it, survived, won.

And then behind him, Sopespian struck. Behind them, the screaming started. The call for blood. Peter led them into the fray so naturally no one noticed what had happened, least of all Caspian.

Not until it was far too late.

𑣿

“Do you think,” Lucy whispers late one night, her head leant against Susan’s knee, “he could still be alive?”

It’s been months, but still none of them can say his name without flinching. Even without it, some part of Caspian shudders still.

For a span of time that feels endless but must only be a handful of moments, the only noise is the quiet snapping of the fire. They all look at him, Edmund overtop of his book, Susan with one hand on Lucy’s head. Lucy, her hands trembling around her knees.

“I don’t know,” Caspian admits, and hates that it’s more or less the truth. He never saw it happen, strictly. Things were moving too quickly, too terribly, and he’d promised, and Peter’d said—

Lucy’s voice wobbles dangerously as she says, “I think he— he could be. He must be. If he were”—she swallows, here, with some difficulty—“if he were gone, I’d know. Wouldn’t I?”

When they found Lucy but not Aslan in the forest that day, found her on her knees in a grove of aspens, begging them to wake up, please wake up, we need you, I’m here, it was the final blow. There really was, Caspian thought, no hope. Perhaps there never had been.

“No,” she said, when they told her what had happened. Why they were there. Her voice was soft at first, then louder, still louder, rending itself to shreds. “No. No. No.”

She didn’t sound like a queen. She sounded nine and inconsolable.

She sounded like a child who had just lost her brother.

She’d flung her cordial at the trunk of one of the long-slumbering aspens, then. Everyone flinched, and Susan said, “Oh, Lucy,” but it didn’t shatter. It didn’t even crack. Caspian had remembered, albeit uselessly, that all the legends agreed the bottle from Father Christmas had been made of diamond. It seemed likely they were right. It also didn’t matter, because what use was her cordial here and now, when it might’ve made all the difference not an hour before at the How? Lucy had rounded on him, tears streaming down her freckled child’s cheeks.

“You promised,” she said, and they didn’t have time for this. Sopespian was after them, the entire Telmarine army was after them, and most of the Narnians were dead.

But she was right. Caspian had promised. Saddling Destrier beneath the How, he’d sworn to her he’d look out for her brothers where he could. That he’d watch Peter’s back.

“I know,” he said, because he did.

She hit him, then, and he let her.

“You promised.”

Again she hit him. And again, her small fists beating against his chest, until Edmund hauled her off of him and let her sob wretchedly into his tabard and mail.

“I— I am sorry,” Caspian tells her now, trying and failing not to think of those first few days as they struggled their way through the forest, one of them always having to sit up through the night not just to watch for enemies, but to keep Lucy from sneaking off and running back to the How and the danger and Peter. Or what was left of them.

Lucy looks at him tiredly from the floor at Susan’s feet and says, “I know.”

That’s the best either of them can do.

𑣿

After Lucy’s risen and gone unsteadily away to bed, Edmund following in her wake with his book beneath his arm, Susan says, lowly, “He’s gone, you know. Dead. And even if he wasn’t, he may as well be now.”

For a moment, Caspian thinks she’s talking about the war—the one here, so like and yet unlike the one they fought and lost in Narnia. About what they told Helen Pevensie when she stood in the kitchen, wide-eyed, and asked them why they hadn’t gone on to school, and who was this, and where was Peter?

They’d told her he’d left them. Gone off to enlist, fake papers and all. Their mother thinks Peter Pevensie is fighting in the war, now, and in a way, that’s the truth. Or it was, anyway. But that doesn’t square with what Susan’s saying, or perhaps Caspian’s more tired than he thinks.

“What do you mean?” he asks.

She’s staring into the fire, running her fingers through her curls and yanking out one stray hair at a time. As Caspian watches, she jerks out another, wraps it around her fist. He winces, but she doesn’t seem to notice.

“Last time we left, we were gone for a thousand years,” Susan tells him. Her voice is toneless, but strangely tilted as she says it, as though it’s terribly heavy and she can only manage to keep it up by one end. “Have you got any idea how long that is? There weren’t even tombs for our friends left, Caspian. Not even tombs.”

“I’m sorry.”

For the first time since they left Narnia, Susan Pevensie turns and meets his gaze, and he knows it was the wrong thing to say. Everything is the wrong thing to say. There’s nothing right left.

“Sometimes,” she says, almost apologetically, “I hate you.”

Caspian laughs. It’s a sound that hurts to make. “Sometimes, I hate myself too.”

“It’s worse than that, though,” Susan murmurs. She leans forward and uncurls her fingers to drop the hair she’s holding into the fireplace. For one awful, nonsensical moment, Caspian thinks she’s going to lean forward further and thrust her whole hand into the flames, but then she breathes out, sinks backwards, and dashes furiously at her cheeks.

He hadn’t even realized she’d started crying. Susan’s always been quiet like that, or at least when she thinks someone’s watching.

He reaches across the span of cushion between them, palm open, and she takes his hand. That surprises him a little. The taking. The lack of hesitation. He doesn’t mind.

“I hate him too, sometimes. Most times.” She squeezes her eyes shut, which does nothing to stay her tears. “What kind of sister does that make me?”

Caspian tells her, “One who loved him.”

𑣿

The thing is, sometimes Caspian wonders. He wonders what’s happening back in Narnia (or more likely, what’s already happened, and kept on happening while no time passes for them at all). He wonders if Lucy’s right, though he knows deep down she can’t be.

Mostly, he wonders what happened to Narnia’s High King after Caspian left him there, bloodied and battered upon the field of battle. Was he carrion for the Dumb Beasts of Narnia who knew not of what they ate? Did the Telmarines burn him on a pyre with the bodies of the rest of the Narnians they slew? Or did those few Narnians that survived take him, spiriting his body away to a sacred place? Perhaps they snuck back into the How by some secret way and laid him in state upon the Stone Table. Perhaps they returned him to Cair Paravel, where he was always meant to rest.

Indulgently, sometimes Caspian dreams Peter Pevensie alive again. Dreams that he’s well. Sometimes, he dreams he died in Peter’s stead, there at the foot of Aslan’s How.

He dreams of other things, too.

𑣿

For the rest of his life, Caspian will remember with great clarity how Peter the Magnificent dies. It is a thing that happens to him constantly, asleep or awake; an eternal present tense. A loop of memory. A haunting. It goes like this:

Peter looks rather haggard when he appears at the edge of the pit Caspian’s hauling himself out of, but he reaches down one gauntleted hand to him nonetheless. Caspian, who just barely survived a confrontation with General Glozelle (more by sheer luck and a little help from one of Reepicheep’s band of Mice—Peepiceek, he thinks, though it was hard to tell the difference under all that mud—than by any skill of his own) takes it gladly, and Peter hauls him up and over the lip of earth.

“Thanks,” Caspian manages, wiping sweat and hair and what might well be blood from his eyes. It’s difficult to tell amidst the chaos, but he thinks one of Peepiceek’s nails nicked his brow when he very heroically used Caspian’s head as a springboard to launch himself at Glozelle. Not that Caspian’s complaining.

“Don’t mention it,” Peter says. He tries to smile, but already, Caspian can tell something’s—off. Wrong. He’s unsteady on his feet, face tight with pain. Under the grime of battle, he seems very pale.

“Are you all right?” Caspian asks, frowning. He sidesteps when a foot soldier appears out of the dust and lunges towards them, tripping him as he passes to send him sprawling into the pit below.

“About that,” Peter replies, rather faintly, and that’s all the warning Caspian has before he stumbles and very nearly falls into the depths himself.

Caspian drops his sword to catch him, which is likely a stupid thing to do in the midst of battle, but then Caspian feels something hot and wet and sticky against his ungloved palm, set there against Peter’s side, and he forgets about everything else unfurling around them. He doesn’t need to look to know that it’s blood, and quite a lot of it at that.

“What happened?”

The skin around Peter’s eyes is creased with pain; his brows furrowed. His sword dangles from one hand, and he grips at Caspian’s shoulder with the other—tightly, as though Caspian is the last solid thing left in the world. “What else? A sword. Your uncle’s.”

Caspian hisses in a breath. “But that was— how long have you been bleeding?”

More importantly, how hadn’t they noticed? But no—the dark red of his tabard. The dust. The heat of battle. Of course they hadn’t. There wasn’t time. And Peter hadn’t said.

He tries to recall which blow could’ve done it, and when, but in this moment comes up empty-handed, bloody-palmed. (He’ll pinpoint it later, the blow that struck home, that took it, and then he will never forget.)

“Long enough,” Peter says. There’s a terrible sort of weariness in his voice.

Caspian says, “Peter,” and then swallows. “What can I do?”

Here’s the thing: they’re losing. Even Caspian can see that. There’s been no sign of Lucy or of Aslan or of a single shred of hope. Their escape is cut off, their numbers are dwindling, and they’re losing. They don’t have time for any of this. But Peter looks at him, and Caspian cannot look away.

“Over there,” he rasps, jerking his head. “The How. Get something at our backs.”

Thinking back later, Caspian recognizes the look in Peter’s eyes; the weight to his tone. He knew. Even then. Even when Caspian didn’t, or perhaps wouldn’t, Peter knew. How could he stand it? Caspian still doesn’t know. But in the moment, he isn’t thinking about any of that, certainly not when a Faun plunges past them in pursuit of a Telmarine, and an arrow whistles past Caspian’s left ear. There’s not much time for thinking in the midst of a losing battle. Putting something at their backs seems as sound a plan as any, so they make their way through the dust and debris and downed corpses of friend and foe (or rather, Caspian makes most of it, Peter stumbling haltingly at his side) until they’re half-sat and half-crouched in the shadow of Aslan’s How.

“We will need to put pressure on that,” Caspian says, wishing he’d thought to carry bandages, or anything useful besides a dagger, really, which by now he doesn’t even have, or Susan’s horn, which can hardly serve them here. Surely someone else has something. They’d stocked supplies for the duel, though Caspian doesn’t recall where Edmund left them. “I’ll go find someone, perhaps—”

“No,” says Peter, and his voice is surprisingly strong. He levers himself up a little straighter, then grimaces as it no doubt tugs at the wound. Caspian can see the gleam of blood on his teeth. “Listen, there’s no time. We’re outnumbered. Unless Lucy turns up…”

He doesn’t finish the thought, grunting with pain as Caspian peels his palm momentarily away from the as-yet unseen wound on his side, masked by blood and tabard and torn-off mail, trying to find a better angle to apply pressure, slow the bleeding. It’s not slowing, is the thing, and Peter doesn’t need to finish for Caspian to know what he’s thinking. There is very little chance, it seems, of Narnia’s youngest Queen arriving in time to make much of a difference, short of a miracle, or something very like it. Aslan is said to be a bringer of such things, of course, but Aslan has also not been seen for a thousand years. Forgive Caspian for doubting. The battlefield is not a friendly place for such fragile things as miracles.

“I’m sorry,” Peter says, head tipped back instead of meeting Caspian’s gaze, and Caspian raises his head in alarm.

“For what?”

“I’m going to do something terribly selfish. Three things, actually. It’s rather awful of me, but it can’t really be helped.” He coughs. It’s a horrible, wet sound. “Well, mostly.”

“Peter—”

“Caspian.” Peter’s voice is shockingly steady, even in the midst of the blood and the pain and the unspooling tumult around them. “Please.”

And what else can Caspian say to him but: “I… All right. What things?”

Something about the relief evident in the breath Peter releases only worries him more—as much as the blood and the pain and that one word, please, so soft and strained. So quietly desperate.

“Well,” Peter replies, “for starters, I’m going to make you swear to do something for me. Though I s’pose I can’t make you. You don’t have to, but—”

“Anything,” Caspian says, and means it. “Anything, I swear.”

“That’s gentlemanly of you,” Peter observes, rather faintly, breathing gone more than a little uneven. His eyes slide closed for a heartbeat, then two. Caspian, though he cannot say why, does not want Peter to close his eyes.

“Peter,” he says again, and finds he has nothing else to say. It’s enough, though. Peter opens his eyes, and for a moment, they both look down at Caspian’s free hand where it rests upon Peter’s knee.

“Hm,” says Peter. “Well. All right. Get them out of here—out of Narnia, I mean. My family. Take them home. Promise me.” He releases a pained breath, somewhere between cough and sigh, tries and fails to wipe the blood fully from his lips. “Promise me— you’ll keep them safe.”

“Why can’t you—?”

Peter looks at him, and the words dry up in Caspian’s throat. “Because,” he says, and holds up two fingers, “of the second thing. I’m going to die.”

“You’re not.”

“Well, I hardly think you’ve got much of a say about these sorts of things.”

Caspian tries again. “You— you cannot.”

He doesn’t know how Peter manages to muster a smile, then, but he does, and it’s the saddest smile Caspian’s ever seen. It knocks the breath out of him.

“I haven’t really got a say either, you know. It’s all right, though. Really it is. We knew it could happen.”

But they hadn’t, not really. When Caspian laid out the ancient Telmarine customs of honorable challenges and single combat, he did so with the intention that he would be the one to face his uncle. Most certainly he knew he would lose, but the point was not to win. Not really. The point was to buy Lucy time, time to find Aslan, and Caspian could at least do that. But no one else seemed to agree, and now there is no Lucy and no Aslan and a duel won but lost all the same. Now there’s only Peter, and Caspian crouched next to him, Peter’s blood seeping out over his hand.

“Lucy’s cordial—”

“Is likely a very long way away by now,” Peter cuts him off. “Don’t bother hoping. It’ll just make this harder.”

Caspian can’t think of anything to say to that. Peter saves him the trouble.

“You promised,” he says, softer. So quiet Caspian can hardly hear it over the din around them. Every scrap of his remaining energy seems focused on Caspian now, intent. Even when Caspian closes his eyes, he cannot escape the weight of Peter’s gaze. He hears Peter shift, and then feels his hand grasp at Caspian’s forearm. The grip is not so firm as it might’ve been, once. “Caspian, please.”

When Caspian nods, it feels as though he’s agreed to something horrible. Something he can never undo.

Perhaps he has.

“Thank you,” Peter breathes.

Caspian does not want his thanks. He wants, quite suddenly and desperately, for Peter to live. To be well. To take Caspian’s hand and rise to his feet and stand unsupported. To venture back into battle at Caspian’s side, if they must, and after—

“What about the third thing?” Caspian asks, because that’s somehow preferable to thinking about all the things that can never be.

“Ah,” says Peter, and he sounds oddly embarrassed. “Well—that’d be this.”

And then his hand moves from Caspian’s vambrace to his cheek, warm even through his gauntlet, and shockingly gentle. Before Caspian quite understands what’s happening, Peter’s mouth finds his, softly, and perhaps a bit afraid.

He tastes like blood and regret and everything Caspian can never have, and what can Caspian do but close his eyes and kiss him back?

It seems like the sort of thing that ought to be desperate and grappling, but it’s not. It’s gentle, if anything. Apologetic. Caspian didn’t know a kiss could be like that—or Peter. Free hand fisting the front of Peter’s tabard, Caspian is unsurprised to realize he wishes it might go on forever, or at least a little longer. But of course, it cannot.

Peter’s eyes are closed when he pulls away, draws in a long and steadying breath. Each inhale is beginning to sound wetter and more labored than the last.

“What was that,” Caspian manages, throat tight, “about not making things harder?”

This time, Peter only musters half a smile. There’s blood at the corners of his mouth. Caspian can taste it on the backs of his teeth. “It’s what I do. Now go, please. Before”—he coughs, groans, turns his head aside to spit blood upon the grass—“it’s too late.”

But it’s already too late, Caspian cannot help but think. In so many ways.

𑣿

Here is something Caspian will never tell him, out of necessity and kindness: it isn’t three selfish things Peter asks of him that day, though selfish is perhaps a matter of perspective, one that will change with time and grief and distance. It’s four.

Asking Caspian to leave him behind is stupid and sacrificial and brave. Magnificent, some might even say. Caspian thinks it’s also the most selfish thing Peter might’ve asked—of Caspian, or of any of his siblings. Perhaps Caspian was the only one he could’ve asked such a thing. The only one who’d agree.

Caspian will forever wish he hadn’t, but in England, there are no White Stags to grant such things. In England, a wish is only a wish, and Peter Pevensie is gone.

𑣿

He lingers. Not long, but longer than he should. Peter doesn’t seem to have the strength to bid him go, there at the end. He simply sits, head tipped back, two fingers on Caspian’s wrist.

When Caspian finally rises to his feet, Peter does not open his eyes. Caspian realizes, then, he cannot tell if Peter’s still breathing. He can’t bring himself to check. If he falters now, turns back even a little, he’s not sure he’ll ever get up again. He may simply sit down beside Peter and wait for his own end to claim him.

But Peter asked, and Caspian promised, and so Caspian leaves him. He will regret that for the rest of his life.

(Still, here is a secret: given the chance, he would not have chosen different.)

Edmund is surprisingly easy to find in the midst of battle. Caspian merely listens for the loudest screams and clash of swords and heads toward it, and there’s Edmund, carving his way through any brave enough to oppose him.

When Caspian approaches, Narnia’s Just King wheels towards him and pulls up short. Perhaps he can already tell by the very set of Caspian’s face, the stilt of his stride, that something is wrong.

For a moment, Edmund searches his face, even as he evades and strikes down another opponent. Over the noise, he asks, “Where’s Peter?”

Caspian opens his mouth and then closes it again when he discovers anything he might say has become a thicket of brambles lodged deep in his throat. It’s enough, though. Just like that, something goes out of Edmund’s face, a candle snuffed in the wind. He stills.

Edmund asks, “Are you certain?”

Caspian gives a jerky half-nod.

“And you left.”

“He made me swear. He wanted you to leave. To get out.”

This earns him a choked sort of noise from Edmund. It’s not at all a laugh. “He tends to do that.” He looks down at the swords grasped in his hands as though they’re a stranger’s, something he’s never seen before, then back up at Caspian. He looks very young, suddenly. “Where is he? I— I can’t leave him.”

“Edmund—”

Fiercely, Edmund says, “He’s my brother.”

“And he wanted you safe,” Caspian replies. He dodges a soldier who appears out of the dust, belatedly remembering he’s weaponless, without a hope of defending himself. Edmund dispatches their opponent instead, though Caspian wonders sometimes if perhaps he might’ve preferred to let him finish Caspian off.

“To hell with what he wants,” Edmund snaps.

Caspian asks, “And what about your sisters?” It’s the cruelest thing he can do, and it works. “What about Lucy? Someone needs to find her. I cannot— I promised him, Edmund. I promised him, but I cannot do this on my own. And I cannot leave you, either.” He catches Edmund’s shoulder, looks him full in the face. “It’s all he asked.”

A moment passes. Somewhere, a trebuchet creaks, and there is a mighty crash as its missile strikes stone.

Softly, Edmund says, “Damn you,” which is how Caspian knows he’s won.

Funnily enough, it feels more akin to losing than anything.

They lose so very much that day.

𑣿

Caspian doesn’t mind school in England, surprisingly. In a way, it’s not so different from his days as a prince, though there’s perhaps less time to himself, and much to relearn. But his life was never very much his own, and he is accustomed to spending days in study. It was something of a surprise to the Pevensies to discover when Caspian crossed over to their world, that same magic which changed his clothes to their English garb also supplied him with papers and things he did not at the time understand to be integral to life in their world. There were even records of him at Peter and Edmund’s school, as though he were someone who has always existed here.

Sometimes, it feels more like he’s stepped into the space Peter left behind, and is doing a poorer job of filling it.

He wonders what Peter might think of that. As with so many things, Caspian will never know.

𑣿

They didn’t know about all this when he first met Helen Pevensie, only that he was dressed the same as Edmund—in uniform, he learns—and he had nowhere else to go.

“Do your parents live in London, dear?” Helen asked, and Caspian did not know where London was just then, but he could see how desperately she needed to talk about something that wasn’t Peter, or the yawning hole of his absence from their midst.

“My parents are dead,” he told her, because that was an old hurt, and easy one.

Susan laid a hand on his arm. “His home is—gone.”

Which was true enough, but dizzying, somehow, to think of. As Caspian watched, something softened in Helen Pevensie’s face, an understanding he couldn’t quite parse. Not then.

“We were thinking,” Susan continued, “we’d try writing to the Professor. See if Caspian might be able to stay with him outside of school.”

But Helen shook her head. “No, no.” She took Caspian’s hands in hers, and Caspian nearly startled, shied away like a horse. He'd hardly been touched since the forest, Lucy’s yielding blows against his chest. “If you need somewhere to stay, it may as well be with us.”

And so he’d stayed. He still does.

𑣿

“Can I ask you something?” Edmund asks him one night at school. They’re perched atop the dormitory roof, something Caspian started doing when everything began to feel like too much, too often. Edmund joined him every time, and eventually told Caspian, quietly, gaze slanting elsewhere, that it’s the sort of thing he and Peter’d started to do their first term after coming back from Narnia.

Caspian looks up from where he’s been sketching out a chart of the English stars. They’re very different from Narnia’s. The whole sky is different—masked and dimmed and distant. Caspian wonders if any of the stars here sing, and if they do, if he could ever hear them.

“All right,” he agrees.

Edmund won’t look at him, which somehow makes Caspian nervous. He shifts atop the shingles, grips his pencil tighter.

Quietly, Edmund asks, “Did you love him?”

Caspian doesn’t remember dropping the pencil, just the gentle clatter of it falling, rolling, tipping away down the roof to the edge. Then it’s gone, leaving Caspian staring after it.

“It’s just,” Edmund continues, not unkind but merciless all the same, “I know how Pete is. Was. About these things. And I wondered if it wasn’t the same for you.”

“I don’t know,” he replies, rather faintly, trying not to think about these things, about how Peter is, about hands on his face and blood that was not his own in his mouth, so that sometimes he swears he tastes it still.

He can feel Edmund gazing at him. “Don’t you?”

And Caspian says, “No. I never had the chance.”

𑣿

He dreams of Peter that night. It’s not an altogether uncommon occurrence, but this time, things are different. Kinder. More vivid.

Often, Caspian’s dreams are of the How or the battle before it. Tonight, he finds himself in an orchard. The branches hang heavy with apples overhead. Sunlight dapples the grass and the leaves and Peter’s hair beside him. Caspian’s not sure how long he’s been there. How long either of them have.

“Thank you,” Peter says at length, sounding rather subdued. They’re sitting close enough that his leg just barely brushes Caspian’s—hip, ankle, knee. “For keeping them safe.”

“But not you,” Caspian replies. His eyes sting, which is how it is that he realizes he’s begun to weep.

“Ah,” Peter says, sounding rather sheepish. “None of that, now. I don’t blame you, Caspian. It couldn’t be helped.”

Helplessly, he asks, “Couldn’t it?”

“No. It would’ve happened one way or the other.” He shrugs, shoulder a brief nudge of warmth against Caspian’s. “I’d’ve been up for my draft papers next year, if nothing else. This year, now, I s’pose.”

“But I couldn’t—”

Peter’s hand is warm on his wrist. “No,” he says, firmly. Kindly. “You couldn’t.”

It’s something of a weight off, to hear it. Even if it doesn’t fix any of this.

Caspian swallows. “And we didn’t—”

“No.” He sounds sadder, at this. “We didn’t.”

Caspian sighs. Swallows hard. “I would have liked to have known you longer. Better.”

Peter snorts. “You couldn’t stand me.”

He’s so alive when Caspian looks at him, here under dreamed-up apple trees, under a golden sky. So real. Or at least Caspian wishes he were.

“You’re wrong,” he says, and Peter looks away, then. Caspian watches his throat work as he swallows.

He sighs. “Well, there’s worse things to be, I’ve been told.”

Caspian supposes he ought to know.

“I’m sorry,” Caspian tells him.

That hand on his wrist again, gentle, anchoring. “It’s not your fault.”

“I am still sorry.” Because he is. Caspian, no longer Tenth, nor prince, nor Narnian, is a lot of things, but mostly, he’s sorry. He is so very, very sorry.

“I suppose you’ll have to work on that,” Peter says. He offers Caspian a lopsided smile, a squeeze of the wrist. “See you someday.”

When Caspian wakes, for just a moment, he can still smell the orchard. Still taste the apples on his tongue.