Chapter Text
“how do i look away now that i have seen you?”
—“april 18, 2017”, rachel mennies
❅
i. edmund
❅
It’s Edmund who sees it first, inasmuch as there’s anything to see that first day in the Shuddering Wood. It’s more potential than anything, then—a hint of what could be more, given time and a chance and a hell of a lot more vulnerability than Peter, at least, has been known to offer. (Not that way, anyway, or at least hardly ever.) Certainly no one else senses it so early on, but Edmund Pevensie is what many called perceptive, back when he was King. Some used prescient, even, though he prefers observant, and anyway, Edmund knows his brother better than he knows himself some days.
All this is to say—he sees it, and them, however much of an it there is to see. He guesses.
It’s more or less like this: Prince Caspian is older than any of them expected for a rightful heir not yet enthroned, and yet there is still the familiar uncertainty of youth running through his limbs, even as he tips his chin up defiantly and holds Peter firmly at the point of his own sword. That’s something Edmund can’t say he was expecting either, though Peter getting into a brawl with the person they’re meant to be helping isn’t the most surprising of things to wake up to these days.
Prince Caspian is also objectively rather pretty, in a word—all dark hair and dark eyes and regal posture, one Edmund’s back and shoulders remember very well themselves—and normally Edmund wouldn’t care or even notice, except now he’s watching Peter watch a drop of blood trickle from the corner of Caspian’s lip instead of minding the blade leveled right at him, and Edmund thinks: Ah.
“You’re not exactly what I was expecting,” Telmar’s heir admits, sounding somewhere between chagrined and wonderstruck, looking Peter up and down and then back up again.
“Neither are you,” Edmund cuts in crisply before Peter can make a fool of himself—an instinct honed over fifteen years of ruling and tested sorely since their return to England.
Peter was always too obvious to be a very subtle diplomat. He can’t bluff for the life of him; everything he’s thinking always ends up written all over his face. Prince Caspian, however, is suddenly looking anywhere besides Peter’s face, so he doesn’t see what Edmund does.
As it turns out, he won’t see it for a very long time.
❅
The tricky part, Edmund thinks, isn’t even that Caspian and his brother are too caught up in whatever pissing contest they’ve started to notice what idiots they’re being, or why. (They manage to sort that bit out eventually, though it takes much more grief and the needling cold of the White Witch’s magic than Edmund would’ve preferred.) It isn’t Peter’s feelings that are the problem either, or not exactly.
It’s that he doesn’t even realize he has them, and wouldn’t admit it even if he did. As oblivious as Caspian the Tenth is proving to be, Peter’s even worse. This isn’t news—but it is frustrating, and exhausting, and sometimes worrying. It’s one thing to take calculated risks, and to make split second choices in the midst of a battle. It’s another thing entirely to put oneself directly in the White Witch’s line of fire (so to speak) in order to shove Caspian out of it.
And after that? Well. Edmund prefers not to think about it. The sight of the Witch stretching beckoning fingers towards his brother while nearly everyone else was too far away to stop it is not one he’ll soon forget.
It takes longer than he’d like to remember how to breathe again afterwards, but once he does, he finds his way back to the heart of the How, passing a downcast Caspian on the way, fiddling with freshly-applied bandages across his palm as he ducks out of Edmund’s path. Peter’s handiwork, no doubt. He always triple-knots the ends. It makes them stick straight out.
Caspian can barely look at him, and Edmund decides that’s a battle left for another day. It’s not really his fault, anyway, so there’s not much to be angry about. Probably it’s Nikabrik’s fault, if it’s anyone’s, but all that makes Edmund very tired to think of, so he merely nods at Caspian (who halfway flinches before nodding back) and keeps walking.
He finds Peter on the floor before the Stone Table, the remains of the Witch’s wand laid across his knees. The cut on his brow still bleeds sluggishly, half-clotted, and one sleeve is torn where the hag got at him with her claws, but he doesn’t seem to care. Instead, he’s fingering the splintered tip of the weapon that nearly ended all of them on the Fords of Beruna, lips pressed tightly together, ice melting all around.
“You know, I never thought about what happened to that back then,” Edmund says quietly. “After everything, and all. I suppose one of her allies spirited it away. I wonder where it’s been all this time.”
Pity they hadn’t tried to use it back then, in those first days when the Narnians were hellbent on stamping out what remained of Jadis’ army. This might’ve been avoided a long time ago if they had.
Peter doesn’t spare him a glance, though Edmund’s already seen the way his brother’s shoulders tightened when he stepped quietly into the room.
“I looked for it,” Peter says. “When the battle was over. I wanted— well. It doesn’t matter, seeing as I didn’t find it. Obviously.”
He’s looking up at the frieze of Aslan on the wall instead of at Edmund, meaning Edmund’s only got his voice and his shoulders and the clench of his jaw by which to read his brother, but the way he can see Peter digging the broken tip of the wand into one thumb says enough.
“I didn’t know,” he offers.
Peter shrugs. “I didn’t want to bring it up.”
Edmund absorbs this for a moment, and then he crosses the last few steps between them and settles down beside his brother on the floor. Surprisingly, Peter relinquishes the wand without protest when Edmund reaches over to pluck it from his grasp. It’s like all the fight’s gone out of him, good and bad and everything in between. Edmund doesn’t much know how to feel about that.
He turns it over in his hands, this thing he remembers better by the shape of it in his gut than its silver-black lines, and is surprised to find it rather heavy. It seemed so fragile beneath his sword all those years ago, like ice under a spring thaw, or a child before a Witch.
Edmund says, at length, “That spell nearly had you.”
It’s not angry, nor accusing, nor even a reprimand. It’s fact, plain and simple. Fact is all Narnia’s Just King has ever needed.
Peter snorts. “Believe me,” he replies, short and bitter, “I’m aware.”
“Are you also aware of how monumentally stupid it was to fling yourself at her like that?” There are certainly more tactful ways of putting it, of course, but then Peter’s never been much for tact. Sometimes it’s best not to bother, with him.
“I wasn’t flinging myself,” Peter protests. He sounds irritated, but maybe not at Edmund. “Someone had to get Caspian away from her.”
Edmund raises one brow. “There were probably better ways than taking his place, Pete.”
Peter doesn’t look at him. “Well, I couldn’t think of any at the time.”
He hadn’t been thinking at all, Edmund knows. That’s the thing about Peter: he feels more than he thinks. He feels, and he acts, and most often it turns out fine (it had this time, even) but it hasn’t always. And it likely won’t every time in the future, either. Edmund, well— Edmund worries. It’s what he does. Someone’s got to; Aslan knows Peter doesn’t, or not about himself anyway.
“Just...just be careful,” he says. “Next time, I mean.”
Peter huffs wryly. “Well, I certainly hope there won’t be a next time someone summons the White Witch.”
The levity he’s grappling for doesn’t quite land, at least not to Edmund.
I meant next time you drop everything for a pretty face, he does not say, because that’s unfair, to Peter and to Caspian.
“I don’t want to lose you,” he admits instead, and Peter looks startled.
“You— What? Ed. You won’t.” He grasps Edmund’s shoulder, and even when everything they once knew is gone sideways and unrecognizable, there’s still this: still the reassuring weight of his brother’s grasp and certainty. “I’m fine. That’s thanks to you, by the way.”
Edmund holds his gaze. “But you and I both know there’s a fair chance this is going to shake out badly.”
“A simple you’re welcome, Peter, next time be less of an idiot would’ve sufficed.”
Despite everything, Edmund finds himself smiling, just a little. “I’m being serious. And you are welcome. But we’re in a jam, here. Everyone knows it. They’re trying not to, but you can see it. They’re frightened.”
Peter sobers. “I know,” he says quietly. Upon his knees, his fingers twitch, flex, ball into fists. “I’m trying not to think about it, honestly. I’m— I’m trying to hope.”
Yes, Edmund thinks. They all are.
❅
(Later, after Edmund’s heart has taken up residence in his throat as Peter narrowly avoids Miraz’s blade but before the battle for Narnia proper begins, Edmund watches Caspian watch his brother there before the How, the gentleness with which he handles Peter’s bad arm and the way he turns, Miraz spared and sword discarded, to look at Peter as a flower to the sun, and thinks that perhaps this may not end so badly—if only Peter will let himself have something more than the barest of necessities for once, and for longer.
If only, indeed.)