"Our Battle Cry Shall Be: 'At Least Our Leader Means Well'", Narnia, Caspian/Peter
Title: Our Battle Cry Shall Be: ‘At Least Our Leader Means Well’
Fandom: The Chronicles Of Narnia
Pairing: Caspian/Peter
Challenge/Prompt: paliphrase, “Never”
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 7060
Genre: Slash/gen
Summary: “You were better-looking in armour.”
Author’s Notes: Because the Caspian/Peter awesomeness is right there on the screen, and because mildly nonsensical randomly chronological stories are like my raison d’etre. Well, that and teh angst, anyway. (Read: pretentious). Although I’ve read most of the original C.S Lewis book, this mostly uses the movie and my own fanon. Cuz yay. And OMG the title, I went through like four different titles before I settled on this one, and I’m still not 100% happy with it. Obviously spoilers for the movie, this is set towards the end.
Just one question before I pack:
When you fuck it up later, do I get my money back?
Aimee Mann
+
Father’s blood on the throne room floor.
…It didn’t happen like this.
+
“You were better-looking in armour,” Caspian observes wryly, sliding a stone, soft and sure, up and down the blade of his sword, grinding off blood and bluntness. A king must always have a sharp sword; it seems prerequisite.
Peter laughs softly, fingering a scratched dent on his breastplate. He doesn’t reply, and Caspian puts his sword back down on the flagstones to roll back the sleeves of his first clean shirt in days.
“I think most monarchs are,” Peter murmurs at last, flashing Caspian a brief smile.
“That doesn’t bode well for my reign,” Caspian replies.
“You’ll be all right,” Peter decides, hardly any conviction in his voice, deliberately not looking at him.
Caspian smiles ruefully, and picks up the sword again.
+
Doctor Cornelius had all the old stories on the shelves of his library, and he told them to Caspian in the orchards outside the palace, voice low and hurried so that the guards would not suspect.
“Your uncle does not like the tales of Narnia,” Cornelius would mumble.
Caspian, pieces of fresh, red apple stuck between his teeth, was just the spoilt young prince. He liked Cornelius; bumbling, quiet, with a comically large beard and a soft voice, weaving streams of stories around them both. Strings of fantastical creatures; centaurs, who had the torsos of men and the legs of horses, and fauns, with a goat’s horns and legs, and minotaurs, both vicious and gentle, claws and teeth and coarse, wiry hair.
He was just a child, then; and Cornelius never told him that the stories were true.
+
His ribs are purple-black with bruising, and the cut above his eyebrow doesn’t really seem to want to stop bleeding. The halls of the castle are full of the wounded and those treating them, hot bowls of water and streams of bandages. Caspian is tending to his own injuries, because it seems a kingly thing to do. Although he grew up always assuming that some day he’d be Caspian the Tenth, he also assumed that by the time he got the crown it would all have become clear.
It has not. It has really, really not.
Caspian winces, sucking sharp air in through his teeth as he prods at what feels a little like a fractured rib, wondering exactly when he acquired it. This kingdom has come at a price and he’s not exactly sure what to do now he’s paid it.
“I am not going to be very good at this, am I?” he murmurs, to no one in particular.
He gets no reply, of course; the silence almost seems affirmative.
+
“You’d do a better job than I would,” Caspian suggests, fingers pressed to the diamond lattice of the castle windows. He can’t bear to enter the courtyard; he remembers the death and the blood on the flagstones and the blame is still too thick and fresh for them to ever bring up the subject again.
“Perhaps.” Peter’s voice is hesitant and the coronation is tomorrow so it’s time to sort this out before it is too late.
“If you want the throne then just say so,” Caspian murmurs, smudging the glass a little. Below, Edmund and Lucy are running around, laughing. Life must be easy for Lucy, Caspian thinks, young enough to still exist within fun and blind faith. Edmund is getting to the age where it is impossible for things to ever be so simple again; but he’ll pretend for a while longer, the way everyone always does. Caspian can’t remember what happened to his childhood. It dripped away a long time ago, longer than his age implies.
“It’s yours,” Peter tells him firmly, though there’s a wistful edge to his voice that they’ll both pretend doesn’t exist.
+
Caspian was… four years old? Five? Too young to understand, anyway. He was dressed in black with silver in his hair, and his father had always been a quiet man at the end of halls anyway, the occasional dry goodnight kiss against Caspian’s forehead. Caspian the Ninth, reduced to some desperate, hazy memories in the back of his son’s mind.
Uncle Miraz smiled with all his teeth, knelt down to Caspian’s level while all around them women wept.
“The kingdom will one day be yours,” he promised, eyes cruel like the hawks Caspian used when hunting. “Until then, I’ll look after it for you. Until you’re old enough.”
+
What if I’m not enough?
Alone, Caspian sits with his head in his hands, and belatedly remembers that he should be celebrating. Miraz is gone, everyone is free, and apparently Aslan believes in him. This is somewhat interesting, since Caspian has only been believing in Aslan for around a week.
The Narnians are distrusting and unused to freedom, whilst the Telmarines regard Caspian as little better than the Dwarves and Centaurs they’ve spent centuries despising. No one will say a word against him, but it’s in their eyes. This is their fresh start, but Caspian wonders how he can be expected to protect this new, altering Narnia. If he’ll inadvertently become a tyrant as brutal as Miraz ever was, all in the name of peace.
It’s been a long time of fear and uncertainty; sharp teeth and narrowed eyes and moments of anxiety in everyone’s dark. It’s impossible to fix it all with merely a crown and a wavering dream.
+
“Your father was a good man,” his mother insisted, as she faded.
+
“‘Once a king or queen in Narnia; always a king or queen in Narnia’,” Caspian quotes.
The Pevensies smile in a tired and nostalgic way. They ruled Narnia before Caspian’s forefathers had even left Telmar, and yet here they sit now, young and happy. Magic ties itself in knots and it’s hard to even think about it without feeling nauseous.
“I am not ready,” he decides, gazing up at the vaulted ceiling of his very own castle. He’s lived within these walls all his life, but they’ve never been his before.
“Aslan thinks you are,” Lucy reminds him, blithe smile, as though that fixes everything. In her mind, it probably does.
Susan’s blue eyes flicker. She admitted it to him once, when death seemed certain; a whisper of I never wanted to be queen, I just wanted to be safe. At the time, battle adrenalin and determination thick in his veins, Caspian didn’t believe her. Now, he has all he ever wanted and it’s turning out to be a little different to his anticipations; he knows what she means.
“I was younger than you when I became a king,” Edmund tells Caspian, shrugging awkwardly. Trapped between a boy and a man, and his lips skim back over his teeth. “I think you can do it.”
Peter says nothing; Caspian waits for him to admit what is so plainly obvious (I want Narnia again, I can fix this quicker than you can), but it doesn’t happen.
+
Doctor Cornelius’ eyes lit up when he told Caspian about the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve, who came from Spare Oom and War Drobe and saved Narnia. From always winter, but never Christmas.
“What’s Christmas?” Caspian asked, lap full of ripe cherries under the night sky. Every glint of moonlight on metal made Cornelius flinch; he glanced around them nervously before he replied.
“A winter celebration of the original Narnian religion.”
They sounded so brave and strong; High King Peter, Queen Susan, King Edmund, Queen Lucy. Eyes shut in the dark, Caspian could picture them all; how courageous they must have been.
High King Peter the Magnificent.
“Do you think I will ever be magnificent?” Caspian asked hopefully, spitting cherry stones through the dark orchard.
“I know you will be, my Prince,” Cornelius replied, clasping his hand.
+
“People died,” Caspian confesses, head bowed. “People died for my lie.”
“It wasn’t a lie,” Susan says.
“You didn’t know it was a lie at the time,” Peter says.
Caspian isn’t sure which statement he is more comforted by; perhaps he just needs the alibi.
+
Pieces of ice still crunching beneath his boots, Caspian awkwardly wound a bandage around his sliced palm, and tried not to think too hard about what he nearly did. The White Witch featured in Doctor Cornelius’ stories, of course, Jadis trembling on the old man’s mouth.
This isn’t what I wanted. Barely enough to convey the sharp terror he felt in his gut as icy air rolled across his cheeks.
“Happy now?” Peter asked dully, pride and body bruised.
“I didn’t see you destroying the Witch,” Caspian muttered, opening the wound on his hand again with a curl of fingers.
“I’m not the one who said it would be all right to bring her back in the first place,” Peter snapped. Playing the game of blaming each other again. “Bloody hell, what were you thinking? How could you be so stupid?”
Outside, they were burying a dead dwarf and Edmund’s eyes were rich with bitterness.
“I am worthless,” Caspian hissed, anger slipping out in his despair, “I am fatherless, and I am so very tired. Isn’t that enough for you?”
+
Susan is braiding Lucy’s hair for the coronation, in a beautiful gown that is probably left over from the last time she was queen. This seems to come easily to the Pevensies; much more easily than it comes to Caspian, for all that he’s been brought up a prince.
“It’s a long way to Tipperary, it’s a long way to go,” Susan sings softly, fingers twisting in her sister’s hair.
Edmund, scuffing the floorboards because he was dressed hours ago, turns towards them with a slight smile.
“It’s a long way to Tipperary; to the sweetest girl I know,” he joins in.
Caspian, battle-marred but still dressed up to take his crown, watches the three of them.
“Goodbye to Piccadilly, farewell Leicester Square…”
A part of the world that Caspian will never know, can never know, and he’s as fascinated as he was when he was just a boy, being told marvellous tales of places that couldn’t possibly be true.
Peter turns from the window and whatever bitterness he’s suppressing to sing the last line: “It’s a long way to Tipperary, but my heart’s still there.”
+
There’s some kind of irony going on, Caspian thinks, plucking nervously at his sleeves. Somehow, his own coronation is scarier than facing all the armies of the Telmarines, lined up to kill them dead, though that isn’t the irony. The irony is that High King Peter was his hero when he was growing up, he was everything that Caspian aspired to be. As Uncle Miraz’ smiles grew cooler, and the castle walls seemed to grow so thick that sunlight could no longer penetrate them, Caspian imagined what his hero would do, how his hero would fix everything. The mythical king who encompassed all that Caspian hoped to be.
Now High King Peter is no longer a myth, and it’s entirely possible that he hates Caspian. He’s young and difficult and headstrong and beautiful and Caspian always wanted High King Peter to save him until he discovered that that was impossible.
“Everyone is ready, your majesty,” Cornelius says, pride flickering in his eyes.
Caspian takes a deep breath.
+
“I don’t think Uncle Miraz likes me,” ten-year-old Caspian admitted, idle fingers sifting through the papers on Doctor Cornelius’ desk. Cornelius’ study was warm and cluttered and full of books and odd little instruments, and the human skull that sat there, staring out eyelessly, and gave Caspian nightmares on sticky summer nights.
His mother had been dead herself for almost three years, laid out quiet in a tomb, and Caspian pretended that he wasn’t desperately lonely.
“I can ride and swim and hunt and handle a sword and a crossbow and I know a thousand years of history and I’m always obedient but none of it seems to work.”
A pout slid across his mouth, and a dozen heavy books slipped off the desk and landed, with crashes, on the floor. Cornelius finally turned away from the window, lips pressed into a thin white line, eyes dark and swimming.
“Come, my prince,” he said, and suggested that they take the lesson outside to celebrate the warm autumn afternoon. Anything to create a distraction.
+
The heavy cloak drags at his shoulders, sliding smoothly across the marble. Coloured light streams through the windows, and everyone seems to be smiling. Caspian does his best, fingers curling at his sides, while officials chant in the old language of Telmar, so old that no one even remembers what the words are (ha nacido para mandar, nuestro rey, alabado sea Caspian).
To his surprise, Peter is waiting for him before the throne, a crown held between his palms. It is not the crown that Caspian’s father wore, not the crown that was kept safe and under guard every minute of every day. Caspian is glad; he loves his father with hindsight and duty, but he wants a new start.
It is perhaps symbolic that the king of old crowns Narnia’s new hope, and Caspian falls a little too heavily to his knees. The marble hurts and he grits his teeth, sunlight in his eyes.
“This was mine,” Peter says quietly, as behind them the chanting reaches a crescendo. “Once upon a very long time ago.”
“I can’t take it,” Caspian responds equally softly, sliding the words between his teeth as he keeps his smile in place. The new king will not crack so soon.
“Of course you can,” Peter tells him, placing the crown on Caspian’s head. For a second, it feels impossibly heavy, the weight of all that trust and responsibility and love pressing down on Caspian’s shoulders, and it is with difficulty that he rises. Peter steps away and Caspian turns to face the small congregation in the throne room, sweeping the thick cloak around him with hands that tremble against the velvet.
Just for a second, it’s almost impossible to swallow down the tears.
+
There are so many people gathered to celebrate his kingship that Caspian feels nauseous. The others take it for granted, in the way they found a centaur guard of honour entirely normal; they take to glory far more easily than Caspian does.
“You’ve earned this,” Edmund tells him, a squeeze of fingers on his arm, as he walks across to help Lucy mount her horse.
“Have I?” Caspian wonders aloud, still choked by doubts that Aslan could not melt away, for all his faith and assurances.
“You lead an army against the Telmarines and won,” Susan points out. Even if it is true that she never wanted to be queen, she still seems to take all the advantages of being a monarch in her stride.
“I lead an army that slaughtered my own people,” Caspian murmurs flatly, turning to his horse, the crown heavy on his head. “And anyway, it was not my victory.”
“I didn’t kill the White Witch,” Peter tells him.
Caspian swallows.
“Aslan knows what he’s doing,” Lucy says peaceably. “Come on.”
Managing to return her toothy smile, Caspian rides out into the sunlight.
+
The Council Chamber was designed to be impenetrable, and to a certain extent it was; though no one had reckoned on an eleven year-old-boy wanting to get in. Caspian found a place to conceal himself; it was the days before he grew, and they weren’t looking for him anyway.
Men argued over things that made no sense to Caspian, and he thought that perhaps he’d been mistaken in thinking that ruling was all about glamour and excitement. Still, he stayed quiet and hidden as the Councillors left, until only a few men remained.
“And how is our prince? Will Caspian be ready to take the throne?”
Uncle Miraz’ laughter was cool and sour. “I do not believe he will ever be ready. He is weak.”
Caspian waited until they had all gone, boots ringing on the icy stone floors, before unfolding himself from his hiding-place, hot tears stringing down his cheeks.
+
Caspian walks the castle hall with Peter, the long room full of portraits, all the way back to the first days of Telmarine rule.
“Am I supposed to call them all traitors now?” Caspian asks, voice ringing out in the silence. He wants to take the crown off - it’s so very heavy - but he’s gained it now so he can’t. “Am I supposed to turn against them?”
“They did what they thought was right,” Peter replies, tone hushed. Outside, the celebrations continue. Caspian doesn’t want to think about how many of the ordinary people singing and drinking wouldn’t care if it were him or Miraz on the throne; he needs to believe that he can take Narnia forward.
“But it was wrong,” Caspian mumbles, footsteps echoing on the cool stone floors, looking up at the line of faces with his eyes, his chin, his mouth. “What do I do?”
His throat feels tight, his eyes are stinging. The stern face of Caspian the Ninth gazes down at him, and Caspian realises how much he does not know his father. How much he does not want to know his father. If he had lived, would Caspian be the king he is now? Or would he be like Miraz, leaving the remnants of the Narnians to hide in the forest?
“Your father would be proud of you,” Peter says quietly, fingers clenched almost too tight around Caspian’s shoulder.
Caspian shakes his head, shrugging off the contact. “No, he wouldn’t.”
+
The sky darkens, and coloured gunpowder signifies the start of his reign. People are dancing and singing and barrels of beer have been flowing merrily for hours. Caspian discovers the dull, nervous edge slips when he’s consumed enough of the sweet mead that people seem to insist on thrusting at him.
Edmund and Lucy are weaving slightly, their first, childish attempts at drinking alcohol merely making them sleepy and giggly. They seem happy enough, laughing in warm shivers of sound. Susan regards them with amusement, though she’s made no effort to curb their celebrating. They’re all still alive, and sometimes that seems nothing short of a miracle.
“I think I’m drunk,” Peter murmurs, a crooked smirk on his lips. Caspian hasn’t seen him in at least three hours, and Peter really could have been doing anything in that time. Caspian says nothing, sliding from his sitting position until his back is against the cold castle flagstones, counting the stars amongst the flashes of fiery light.
“Oh, Pete,” Susan sighs, somewhere above him.
+
“When will I be old enough to be king?” Caspian was twelve, and bored with schoolwork and people who were obediently deferential but who never let him do what he wanted. For some reason, he hadn’t yet managed to learn that being king did not mean sitting around all day eating sweet ices and getting other people to do your lessons for you.
The corners of Cornelius’ eyes crinkled in a tired fashion, as they did more and more these days. The Councillors were dwindling in number, and Caspian had rather thought that they were all there to rule on his behalf until it was his turn. But Lord Belisar was brought home from a hunting trip two weeks ago with an unfortunate crossbow bolt in his back, and how long would Caspian have to wait?
“My prince, you may never become king,” Cornelius told him, in a voice that sounded so cracked with age and exhaustion that it didn’t sound like his any more. “Surely you must have realised by now that Lord Miraz is ruling this kingdom in all but name?”
(Oh, childhood naïveté.)
+
“How long will you stay, do you think?” Caspian asks. He and Peter are propped against the castle courtyard wall, sharing a jug of rather potent wine between them; revellers surround them, there are bonfires blazing and songs and Caspian is reasonably certain that he does not want to know what those two palomino centaurs are doing in the shadows.
Peter shrugs easily, crooked smile inching up his face.
“I don’t know,” he admits. “This is better than Latin, anyway. And Geography. And Arithmetic.”
Caspian frowns.
“But you are a king,” he says slowly.
“Not where I come from.” Peter laughs; the sound is blurred and heavy. “Where I come from I’m just a skinny, friendless schoolboy.”
“But War Drobe-” Caspian begins a little plaintively; reality is always so much less glamorous than legends make it seem.
“Don’t be stupid,” Peter mutters, rolling his head to look at Caspian. “I don’t come from some special place called War Drobe, I came through a wardrobe. Where you keep clothes? I walked into a wardrobe and came out in Narnia. That’s it. Then it turned out there was a prophecy, and Edmund got himself kidnapped, and before we knew it I was leading Aslan’s armies. That’s it. That’s all. There’s no secret city of heroes in another world, just cupboards and underground stations and mad old professors in country houses.”
Caspian thinks that he might be sick.
“You proved yourself,” he mutters at last.
“Do you want to know what I was doing in the minutes before you blew that horn?” Peter demands, eyes glinting with reflected firelight. “I was getting my sodding head kicked in by some stupid little boys.” They both watch the sky for a moment or two, an uncomfortable silence stewing. “You’ll make at least as good a king as I did,” Peter offers.
The reassurance no longer matters, and Caspian would walk away if it weren’t for the fact he suspects he’ll fall over if he tries to move.
“Please don’t talk any more,” he murmurs, fingers curling into fists against the flagstones.
+
When Caspian was little, and so very alone, he imagined himself a friend to walk the dark halls of the castle with. The stories Cornelius told him were rich and bright, vivid tales of a land that sounded nothing like Narnia, but he picked through them and chose High King Peter to be his friend. Running alone through the castle courtyard, he imagined Peter running beside him. Noble, brave and strong, Peter was everything that Caspian hoped he might be one day. With Peter by his side, Caspian had nothing and no one to be afraid of.
He would be High King Peter’s closest friend, and no one would ever ignore him again. No one would leave him shut up in cold, dark rooms, and everyone would want to talk to him and help him. Caspian clung onto this fantasy because, after his mother died, he had no one in the world but Cornelius, and he would never get too close for fear of the consequences.
To say that he was disappointed when he actually met Peter, and found him to be a boy of his own age and just as fallible as anyone, would be an understatement. And he would never admit to anyone how much it stung when Peter brushed him easily aside, and treated Caspian the way he had always been treated; not as a friend, or as anyone who could offer anything. Just a necessary nuisance, who would have to be tolerated in case he turned out to be useful one day.
+
“Have you seen Peter?” Susan asks. Her dark hair curls across her bared shoulders, but she has refrained from the worst of the celebrations, and she is clear-voiced and steady on her feet. Caspian is obscurely angry and permanently anxious and has drunk more than is sensible because of these facts, and is therefore staggering along the hall clinging onto tapestries and stones in the hopes of staying upright.
“No,” he murmurs, fingers skidding against the wall, and he nearly trips over his boots.
Susan sighs. She forcibly dragged Edmund and Lucy off to bed hours ago, and now it seems she wants to be the responsible sister for Peter too. Caspian hates the whole family right now, for being what he isn’t and for doing it all so effortlessly, and so keeps walking, determinedly fitting one foot before the other.
“You stupid, stupid boy,” Susan murmurs, and Caspian could point out that he’s just about older than her and he’s king now, but he can’t get that many words out. Instead, he allows Susan to pull him away from the wall, loop his arm around her shoulders, and half-carry him down the hall.
He’s already undignified and exhausted; he can hardly make it worse.
+
Caspian should have insisted that the castle could not have been taken, that it was too well-defended, that there were always going to be variables. That Peter was running on assumptions of a Narnia that didn’t exist any longer. That Miraz would do whatever it took and that all Peter would be doing would be proving a point of martyrdom.
He didn’t fight hard enough. And the creatures of his childhood stories were slaughtered before his eyes, just to emphasise the point.
Later, Peter blaming him seemed to make perfect sense. Everything that Caspian had ever trusted in and believed in had turned against him, his childhood curling up into sour lies that could not be swallowed. Lives had been lost; and so had most of his spirit.
Even now, he’s not sure how whole he can pretend to be.
+
“You need to stop this,” Susan informs Caspian, pushing him down on a bed in a room somewhere that is not his own - his uncle had Caspian’s four-poster shot to pieces all in the name of progress.
Somehow, Caspian is still wearing his crown, though it’s somewhat haphazard on his hair now. He pulls it off, and it rolls across the covers. He fumbles for it, but Susan’s steady hands curl around the gold.
“You are a king,” she informs him calmly. “Aslan believes in you, the people believe in you, even Pete believes in you, though he’ll never admit it. It doesn’t matter if you believe in yourself or not. You have to let that go.”
Caspian laughs bitterly, and wonders if it was all so easy for her.
“I am not a hero,” he mumbles, “And it was not my victory.”
“That doesn’t matter any more,” Susan tells him. “Just look forwards, and everyone will forget about the past.”
Caspian rolls onto his side, and pulls a pillow over his head.
+
Caspian’s seventeenth birthday was overshadowed by Lady Pruniprismia announcing her pregnancy.
“Pray for a girl,” Cornelius advised on stifling summer afternoons, as Caspian pored over sums and history and law and astronomy.
“Why?” Caspian asked, fingertips smeared with black ink. Uncle Miraz referred to him as bookish, shy and dull; Caspian listened at doorways and in passages and could yet make no sense of half of what he heard.
“If Miraz has a son, he has a successor,” Cornelius replied, flicking through one of the thick books of Telmarine law that Caspian was unsuccessfully studying.
“But I am his successor,” Caspian said, and then it all finally slotted into place. “Oh.”
“Pray,” Cornelius repeated. “And hope. I fear for you, if he should have a son.”
Miraz rubbed Pruniprismia’s growing stomach, laughed most of the time, and tightened castle security. Caspian was not allowed to leave the walls; he gazed out at the orchards and their ripe fruit longingly, wistfully stared across the plains. Even made of cool stone, the castle was swelteringly hot on summer nights, and he began to feel ever more trapped, as the months slid past.
“What will we do, if Lord Miraz has a son?” Caspian asked, but only once.
Cornelius removed his eyeglasses, and shook his head. “I do not know, my prince.”
+
Sliding in and out of exhaustion, Caspian lies in the dark. Outside the walls, the celebrations continue; they may never stop. Caspian can no longer remember what they’re celebrating, but his right hand is curled tight around a thick golden crown, so hard that it’s left marks on his palm.
“Mine,” he mumbles incoherently, and can’t make himself believe it.
Susan obviously does not know the castle as Caspian does, and so when she does eventually find Peter she leads him to the same room. Peter’s face is still swollen with battle bruising, and he is unsteady on his feet.
“Grow up, Pete,” Susan is murmuring. “For the last year you’ve been acting like a spoilt child.”
“I was a king,” Peter mutters back. “A king, Su.”
Susan sighs, face illuminated only by moonlight. She looks beautiful and unattainable, before she scowls once more, dragging Peter over to the bed and pushing him on. Caspian rolls away, still angry with Peter for not being the person he so childishly wished him to be, and Susan makes another soft sound of frustration.
“Get some sleep,” she advises, and slams the door.
After a while, Caspian asks: “Is she always like that?”
Peter laughs; it sounds a little like he’s choking. “Sometimes she’s worse.”
+
Caspian dreams of murders, of the paintings of his father going up in flames. He dreams of his father’s blood on the throne room floor, and Miraz smearing his fingers over the slick-wet red blade of his sword. He dreams of the crown being wrenched from his hands, of Telmarines take whatever they want, of the bloody, blank faces of the people he let down.
In the morning, Peter is puffy-eyed and sick-looking, and Caspian can’t hear his own thoughts over the headache that threatens to split his skull open.
“Morning, your majesty,” Peter murmurs, baring his teeth in an approximation of a smile.
“Shut up,” Caspian responds, burying his face in the blanket, and drifting back towards sleep again.
+
“You were always my favourite,” Caspian murmurs later, when a tired-looking courtier brings them tea and toast. He and Peter have managed to remove their boots and are both sitting under the blankets, because however stupid and compromising this situation looks, they both drank too much last night, and they’re in hurt.
“What do you mean?” Peter asks, crumbs across his shirt and jam on his fingers, he looks more like a child than ever. Caspian can’t help the smirk that steals across his mouth when he notices that.
“The legends of my childhood,” Caspian explains, throat scalded from hot tea. “Magic creatures and kings and queens and Aslan. High King Peter was always my favourite.”
“Oh.” Peter looks away, guilt on his face. “And I told you-”
“It was no worse than some of the other truths I’ve found out this week,” Caspian shrugs. Trying not to make it matter.
“I’m a bastard,” Peter decides.
Caspian grins toothily at him. “No more so than usual.”
+
As a boy, all Caspian really wanted was to belong, and to be loved. Brought up away in quiet, cold rooms with a disinterested father who soon became dead, and a mother who seemed to wilt like a flower as the winters passed, he learned of the world from Cornelius. Caspian is not a true Telmarine (he has not the sentiment, Miraz spat to the Council, he doesn’t understand what it is to be a Telmarine. He is soft and weak and will be a boy all his life) and it may have saved him this time, but it may not next time.
There will be a next time. Things are still fluidly uncertain, and enough lives have been lost for traces of anger and despair to linger.
+
“You will leave soon, won’t you.” Caspian mumbles flatly. He should leave this room, wash and dress, try and look more like a king rather than a callow youth who had rather more wine than was at all sensible last night.
“I don’t want to,” Peter says.
“You’ll go,” Caspian decides, picking at threads in the quilt. He doesn’t add: and I’ll be all alone again because that’s a childish insecurity he’s going to suppress. It’s entirely possible to be alone while surrounded by people, as it turns out, but that is one of those things that can’t mean anything any more.
Peter smiles feebly; it doesn’t reach his eyes, and there’s a smudge of red jam on his top lip that keeps him a boy and not a legend.
“You remind me of me, you know,” he remarks.
“I kind of wish I didn’t,” Caspian tells him, not taking his eyes off the blanket.
“It’s not that much of a bad thing,” Peter says, sounding rather smug.
“You would say that.”
Peter laughs knowingly, which makes Caspian look up, and he’s about to say you have jam on your mouth just to shut him up when Peter surprises him by leaning in a little too close, knowing smirk dissolving. He wants to pull away because your childhood idolatries are never meant to become adult desires, but he doesn’t.
Caspian’s mouth opens and he doesn’t know what to say, but then it turns out that Peter is no longer interested in speaking and that, too, makes a kind of tired sense.
(And someone kisses first, but later on they’ll both swear blind it was the other; just something else to become lost and twisted by history and the mutual refusal to remember.)
+
Later, Peter turns the crown over in his hands. He’s too young for nostalgia, but momentarily the look on his face is that of the man he was once, thirteen hundred years ago.
“Tell me something,” Caspian says. “Tell me something before you leave.”
“I’m not leaving yet,” Peter mumbles, lost between the man he was and the boy he has to be and the man he will become, given time. He sighs. “Fine. I want your throne, I want you, and I want to stay here for the foreseeable future.”
“Oh.” Caspian smiles tiredly.
“Yes, oh.” Peter hands back the crown; it seems to have grown in weight. “I think that’s what growing up is,” he decides.
“Not getting what you want?” Caspian asks.
“It’s more than that.” Peter sighs. “It’s… ripping apart your shirt to find that your brother’s already carrying a torch, it’s leading an army into battle only to hand the prize over to someone else, it’s getting hundreds killed only to find if you’d just believed your little sister everyone would have lived.” His mouth twists. “It’s discovering that the magical paradise you believed in for a year has grown up without you and stopped being what you thought it was.”
“Your uncle killed your father and no one saw fit to tell you until the worst possible moment,” Caspian adds. “And someone else fights the one-on-one battle for your kingdom against your uncle.”
They both trail into silence.
“I think I’d like to stop growing up now,” Caspian decides.
“Me too,” Peter mumbles, handing back the crown. “Me bloody too.”
+
“I think that you’re Hamlet,” Edmund decides over lunch.
He and Lucy look a little tired and sick, but they’re brightening up considerably, and no doubt they’ll soon be sneaking drinks from the bottles they’ve been instructed not to touch in the way that all children do. Caspian has fond memories of the castle’s wine cellars, and slightly less fond memories of vomiting in the courtyard a few hours later. Now, though, there’s no one to beat him for drinking the wine that had been there for decades, being saved for some kind of special occasion, and Doctor Cornelius will no longer give him the disappointed expressions of a teacher let down by his student.
Caspian is king now. He can do as he wishes. And yet he knows that he can’t; there is almost too far left to go.
“I do not know who Hamlet is,” Caspian replies calmly. He is unable to look at Peter, and it is entirely possible that he will never be able to eat jam again, but Susan is smiling knowingly. Her dark hair waves loosely around her shoulders, but she looks resigned, as though she too understands that the cost can sometimes overshadow the actual result.
“It’s a story where we come from,” Peter explains quickly. He’s smiling. “Ed, I think you’re right.”
Edmund just laughs, and Caspian could ask for clarification, and he could even enquire if they were ever visited by Hamlet just so they’d know what it feels like to be harassed by your childhood fables, but he remains quiet.
Peter smiles sweetly at him across the table, expression resigned; Aslan wants to speak to him and Susan this afternoon.
+
Father’s blood on the throne room floor would have been an impossibility because Miraz preferred secluded shadows to an outward murder. Nonetheless, Caspian imagines red to be seeping across the stone, and he wonders how many Telmarine kings stood where he stands now only because they slaughtered their fathers, brothers, uncles and cousins. Whether their entire lineage is based purely on cloak and dagger, on knives and poisons and cruel, enigmatic smiles. Something to be proud of, no?
“Smile,” Peter calls teasingly from the doorway.
“What are you doing here?” Caspian asks, turning with more anger than he means to. He swallows, trying to soften his tone. “Shouldn’t you be with Aslan?”
“In a minute,” Peter shrugs, easing the door closed and walking across to join him. “I think I already know what he’s going to tell me.”
“You have to leave,” Caspian guesses.
“I think so,” Peter agrees. “Which is a shame, as I’m sure I’ve got a Latin test when I get back, and your uncle knocked all the subjunctives out of my head.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Caspian says a little desperately. His laugh cracks in the middle.
“It doesn’t matter,” Peter replies.
They stand in silence for a moment, and this would be the time to say a proper goodbye before it’s too late; but they don’t have the capacity to make themselves that vulnerable to each other again. Things are still a little too sharp (they always will be).
+
Doctor Cornelius first told Caspian about Aslan when he was around six and waiting for a broken arm to heal (his first fall off a horse; his mother sang him songs in the language of Telmar that no one speaks any more, and Uncle Miraz merely sneered while feigning sympathy for propaganda). It was a hot summer evening, and Caspian’s shirt stuck to his skin, while the sling that held his arm itched awkwardly.
“He knows everything,” Cornelius explained, “And there is nothing that he is incapable of.”
“Then why did he leave?” Caspian enquired, too young to realise that his question was the one that must never be asked.
Cornelius said nothing, but his eyes glittered in the candlelight, bright and sad. From then on, he only ever mentioned Aslan in passing, if he appeared in another of the old Narnia tales, and in time Caspian all but forgot about him.
+
That evening, with the Kings and Queens of Old returned to their own land (and, Caspian adds inside his own head, to their schooling; everywhere but here they’re just children, after all, for all that their subjects would never believe it), Caspian takes his new crown and his new sword and walks through the dusk to the crypt.
Aslan’s How, even half-collapsed from Telmarine trebuchets, puts the Royal Family Tomb to shame, but nonetheless the high stone ceilings are beautiful and cool. Caspian’s boots echo on the floor, just one set of feet, and he remembers once again how alone he is. Acknowledging it doesn’t make it easier. Caspian the First’s grave is starting to crumble a little, but he bows for respect anyway, leaving a blood-red flower as is tradition.
There have been many Telmarine kings over the last thirteen hundred years, and Caspian leaves flowers at each tomb because he may despise them and hate them for making his life harder, but they are still his ancestors. Work has begun on a grave in black marble for King Miraz the First; it is only right that these things are observed. Only then can healing begin.
King Caspian the Ninth lies beneath a stone slab with a statue of himself laid out on top. The statue looks peaceful, the white stone barely darkened. Caspian has not been down here for a long time; a faded length of scarlet ribbon has been tied neatly around the statue’s neck; perhaps Miraz thought it a joke. Caspian makes no move to undo it, merely scatters white flowers over the tomb. His mother lies beside his father, arms folded over her stone chest, and Caspian covers her in purple flowers.
With Lady Pruniprismia gone, and Miraz and his parents dead, Caspian is left alone in the world. He stares down at the carving of his father, and wonders if it is accurate; if this is what the man he can scarcely remember looked like. He thinks that the statue has a nose of a similar shape to his own, but it seems ridiculous to speculate. Instead, Caspian unsheathes his new sword (When Aslan bares his teeth, Winter meets its death), presses the tip to the stone floor, and kneels for the sake of honour.
“Father,” he says, and Telmarines have traditions as fervent as the Narnians do. And it is said, of course, that a new king can speak to his ancestors at the very beginning of his reign, and they will hear. It is a mere superstition that Caspian has never believed, but then Queen Susan’s horn turned out to work, so perhaps there is some form of magic in this cold stone crypt after all.
“Father,” he begins again, mouth suddenly dry. “You were naïve.” He thinks again for a moment. “No, you weren’t naïve, you were stupid.”
The statue doesn’t move, and makes no sign that it has heard, which is, on the whole, a relief.
“…But I think that I might be stupid too,” Caspian admits, because there’s no one left to say it to. “And I believe things might work out fine in spite of that.”
Behind him, just for a second, he thinks he hears Peter laugh.
+
Fandom: The Chronicles Of Narnia
Pairing: Caspian/Peter
Challenge/Prompt: paliphrase, “Never”
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 7060
Genre: Slash/gen
Summary: “You were better-looking in armour.”
Author’s Notes: Because the Caspian/Peter awesomeness is right there on the screen, and because mildly nonsensical randomly chronological stories are like my raison d’etre. Well, that and teh angst, anyway. (Read: pretentious). Although I’ve read most of the original C.S Lewis book, this mostly uses the movie and my own fanon. Cuz yay. And OMG the title, I went through like four different titles before I settled on this one, and I’m still not 100% happy with it. Obviously spoilers for the movie, this is set towards the end.
Just one question before I pack:
When you fuck it up later, do I get my money back?
Aimee Mann
+
Father’s blood on the throne room floor.
…It didn’t happen like this.
+
“You were better-looking in armour,” Caspian observes wryly, sliding a stone, soft and sure, up and down the blade of his sword, grinding off blood and bluntness. A king must always have a sharp sword; it seems prerequisite.
Peter laughs softly, fingering a scratched dent on his breastplate. He doesn’t reply, and Caspian puts his sword back down on the flagstones to roll back the sleeves of his first clean shirt in days.
“I think most monarchs are,” Peter murmurs at last, flashing Caspian a brief smile.
“That doesn’t bode well for my reign,” Caspian replies.
“You’ll be all right,” Peter decides, hardly any conviction in his voice, deliberately not looking at him.
Caspian smiles ruefully, and picks up the sword again.
+
Doctor Cornelius had all the old stories on the shelves of his library, and he told them to Caspian in the orchards outside the palace, voice low and hurried so that the guards would not suspect.
“Your uncle does not like the tales of Narnia,” Cornelius would mumble.
Caspian, pieces of fresh, red apple stuck between his teeth, was just the spoilt young prince. He liked Cornelius; bumbling, quiet, with a comically large beard and a soft voice, weaving streams of stories around them both. Strings of fantastical creatures; centaurs, who had the torsos of men and the legs of horses, and fauns, with a goat’s horns and legs, and minotaurs, both vicious and gentle, claws and teeth and coarse, wiry hair.
He was just a child, then; and Cornelius never told him that the stories were true.
+
His ribs are purple-black with bruising, and the cut above his eyebrow doesn’t really seem to want to stop bleeding. The halls of the castle are full of the wounded and those treating them, hot bowls of water and streams of bandages. Caspian is tending to his own injuries, because it seems a kingly thing to do. Although he grew up always assuming that some day he’d be Caspian the Tenth, he also assumed that by the time he got the crown it would all have become clear.
It has not. It has really, really not.
Caspian winces, sucking sharp air in through his teeth as he prods at what feels a little like a fractured rib, wondering exactly when he acquired it. This kingdom has come at a price and he’s not exactly sure what to do now he’s paid it.
“I am not going to be very good at this, am I?” he murmurs, to no one in particular.
He gets no reply, of course; the silence almost seems affirmative.
+
“You’d do a better job than I would,” Caspian suggests, fingers pressed to the diamond lattice of the castle windows. He can’t bear to enter the courtyard; he remembers the death and the blood on the flagstones and the blame is still too thick and fresh for them to ever bring up the subject again.
“Perhaps.” Peter’s voice is hesitant and the coronation is tomorrow so it’s time to sort this out before it is too late.
“If you want the throne then just say so,” Caspian murmurs, smudging the glass a little. Below, Edmund and Lucy are running around, laughing. Life must be easy for Lucy, Caspian thinks, young enough to still exist within fun and blind faith. Edmund is getting to the age where it is impossible for things to ever be so simple again; but he’ll pretend for a while longer, the way everyone always does. Caspian can’t remember what happened to his childhood. It dripped away a long time ago, longer than his age implies.
“It’s yours,” Peter tells him firmly, though there’s a wistful edge to his voice that they’ll both pretend doesn’t exist.
+
Caspian was… four years old? Five? Too young to understand, anyway. He was dressed in black with silver in his hair, and his father had always been a quiet man at the end of halls anyway, the occasional dry goodnight kiss against Caspian’s forehead. Caspian the Ninth, reduced to some desperate, hazy memories in the back of his son’s mind.
Uncle Miraz smiled with all his teeth, knelt down to Caspian’s level while all around them women wept.
“The kingdom will one day be yours,” he promised, eyes cruel like the hawks Caspian used when hunting. “Until then, I’ll look after it for you. Until you’re old enough.”
+
What if I’m not enough?
Alone, Caspian sits with his head in his hands, and belatedly remembers that he should be celebrating. Miraz is gone, everyone is free, and apparently Aslan believes in him. This is somewhat interesting, since Caspian has only been believing in Aslan for around a week.
The Narnians are distrusting and unused to freedom, whilst the Telmarines regard Caspian as little better than the Dwarves and Centaurs they’ve spent centuries despising. No one will say a word against him, but it’s in their eyes. This is their fresh start, but Caspian wonders how he can be expected to protect this new, altering Narnia. If he’ll inadvertently become a tyrant as brutal as Miraz ever was, all in the name of peace.
It’s been a long time of fear and uncertainty; sharp teeth and narrowed eyes and moments of anxiety in everyone’s dark. It’s impossible to fix it all with merely a crown and a wavering dream.
+
“Your father was a good man,” his mother insisted, as she faded.
+
“‘Once a king or queen in Narnia; always a king or queen in Narnia’,” Caspian quotes.
The Pevensies smile in a tired and nostalgic way. They ruled Narnia before Caspian’s forefathers had even left Telmar, and yet here they sit now, young and happy. Magic ties itself in knots and it’s hard to even think about it without feeling nauseous.
“I am not ready,” he decides, gazing up at the vaulted ceiling of his very own castle. He’s lived within these walls all his life, but they’ve never been his before.
“Aslan thinks you are,” Lucy reminds him, blithe smile, as though that fixes everything. In her mind, it probably does.
Susan’s blue eyes flicker. She admitted it to him once, when death seemed certain; a whisper of I never wanted to be queen, I just wanted to be safe. At the time, battle adrenalin and determination thick in his veins, Caspian didn’t believe her. Now, he has all he ever wanted and it’s turning out to be a little different to his anticipations; he knows what she means.
“I was younger than you when I became a king,” Edmund tells Caspian, shrugging awkwardly. Trapped between a boy and a man, and his lips skim back over his teeth. “I think you can do it.”
Peter says nothing; Caspian waits for him to admit what is so plainly obvious (I want Narnia again, I can fix this quicker than you can), but it doesn’t happen.
+
Doctor Cornelius’ eyes lit up when he told Caspian about the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve, who came from Spare Oom and War Drobe and saved Narnia. From always winter, but never Christmas.
“What’s Christmas?” Caspian asked, lap full of ripe cherries under the night sky. Every glint of moonlight on metal made Cornelius flinch; he glanced around them nervously before he replied.
“A winter celebration of the original Narnian religion.”
They sounded so brave and strong; High King Peter, Queen Susan, King Edmund, Queen Lucy. Eyes shut in the dark, Caspian could picture them all; how courageous they must have been.
High King Peter the Magnificent.
“Do you think I will ever be magnificent?” Caspian asked hopefully, spitting cherry stones through the dark orchard.
“I know you will be, my Prince,” Cornelius replied, clasping his hand.
+
“People died,” Caspian confesses, head bowed. “People died for my lie.”
“It wasn’t a lie,” Susan says.
“You didn’t know it was a lie at the time,” Peter says.
Caspian isn’t sure which statement he is more comforted by; perhaps he just needs the alibi.
+
Pieces of ice still crunching beneath his boots, Caspian awkwardly wound a bandage around his sliced palm, and tried not to think too hard about what he nearly did. The White Witch featured in Doctor Cornelius’ stories, of course, Jadis trembling on the old man’s mouth.
This isn’t what I wanted. Barely enough to convey the sharp terror he felt in his gut as icy air rolled across his cheeks.
“Happy now?” Peter asked dully, pride and body bruised.
“I didn’t see you destroying the Witch,” Caspian muttered, opening the wound on his hand again with a curl of fingers.
“I’m not the one who said it would be all right to bring her back in the first place,” Peter snapped. Playing the game of blaming each other again. “Bloody hell, what were you thinking? How could you be so stupid?”
Outside, they were burying a dead dwarf and Edmund’s eyes were rich with bitterness.
“I am worthless,” Caspian hissed, anger slipping out in his despair, “I am fatherless, and I am so very tired. Isn’t that enough for you?”
+
Susan is braiding Lucy’s hair for the coronation, in a beautiful gown that is probably left over from the last time she was queen. This seems to come easily to the Pevensies; much more easily than it comes to Caspian, for all that he’s been brought up a prince.
“It’s a long way to Tipperary, it’s a long way to go,” Susan sings softly, fingers twisting in her sister’s hair.
Edmund, scuffing the floorboards because he was dressed hours ago, turns towards them with a slight smile.
“It’s a long way to Tipperary; to the sweetest girl I know,” he joins in.
Caspian, battle-marred but still dressed up to take his crown, watches the three of them.
“Goodbye to Piccadilly, farewell Leicester Square…”
A part of the world that Caspian will never know, can never know, and he’s as fascinated as he was when he was just a boy, being told marvellous tales of places that couldn’t possibly be true.
Peter turns from the window and whatever bitterness he’s suppressing to sing the last line: “It’s a long way to Tipperary, but my heart’s still there.”
+
There’s some kind of irony going on, Caspian thinks, plucking nervously at his sleeves. Somehow, his own coronation is scarier than facing all the armies of the Telmarines, lined up to kill them dead, though that isn’t the irony. The irony is that High King Peter was his hero when he was growing up, he was everything that Caspian aspired to be. As Uncle Miraz’ smiles grew cooler, and the castle walls seemed to grow so thick that sunlight could no longer penetrate them, Caspian imagined what his hero would do, how his hero would fix everything. The mythical king who encompassed all that Caspian hoped to be.
Now High King Peter is no longer a myth, and it’s entirely possible that he hates Caspian. He’s young and difficult and headstrong and beautiful and Caspian always wanted High King Peter to save him until he discovered that that was impossible.
“Everyone is ready, your majesty,” Cornelius says, pride flickering in his eyes.
Caspian takes a deep breath.
+
“I don’t think Uncle Miraz likes me,” ten-year-old Caspian admitted, idle fingers sifting through the papers on Doctor Cornelius’ desk. Cornelius’ study was warm and cluttered and full of books and odd little instruments, and the human skull that sat there, staring out eyelessly, and gave Caspian nightmares on sticky summer nights.
His mother had been dead herself for almost three years, laid out quiet in a tomb, and Caspian pretended that he wasn’t desperately lonely.
“I can ride and swim and hunt and handle a sword and a crossbow and I know a thousand years of history and I’m always obedient but none of it seems to work.”
A pout slid across his mouth, and a dozen heavy books slipped off the desk and landed, with crashes, on the floor. Cornelius finally turned away from the window, lips pressed into a thin white line, eyes dark and swimming.
“Come, my prince,” he said, and suggested that they take the lesson outside to celebrate the warm autumn afternoon. Anything to create a distraction.
+
The heavy cloak drags at his shoulders, sliding smoothly across the marble. Coloured light streams through the windows, and everyone seems to be smiling. Caspian does his best, fingers curling at his sides, while officials chant in the old language of Telmar, so old that no one even remembers what the words are (ha nacido para mandar, nuestro rey, alabado sea Caspian).
To his surprise, Peter is waiting for him before the throne, a crown held between his palms. It is not the crown that Caspian’s father wore, not the crown that was kept safe and under guard every minute of every day. Caspian is glad; he loves his father with hindsight and duty, but he wants a new start.
It is perhaps symbolic that the king of old crowns Narnia’s new hope, and Caspian falls a little too heavily to his knees. The marble hurts and he grits his teeth, sunlight in his eyes.
“This was mine,” Peter says quietly, as behind them the chanting reaches a crescendo. “Once upon a very long time ago.”
“I can’t take it,” Caspian responds equally softly, sliding the words between his teeth as he keeps his smile in place. The new king will not crack so soon.
“Of course you can,” Peter tells him, placing the crown on Caspian’s head. For a second, it feels impossibly heavy, the weight of all that trust and responsibility and love pressing down on Caspian’s shoulders, and it is with difficulty that he rises. Peter steps away and Caspian turns to face the small congregation in the throne room, sweeping the thick cloak around him with hands that tremble against the velvet.
Just for a second, it’s almost impossible to swallow down the tears.
+
There are so many people gathered to celebrate his kingship that Caspian feels nauseous. The others take it for granted, in the way they found a centaur guard of honour entirely normal; they take to glory far more easily than Caspian does.
“You’ve earned this,” Edmund tells him, a squeeze of fingers on his arm, as he walks across to help Lucy mount her horse.
“Have I?” Caspian wonders aloud, still choked by doubts that Aslan could not melt away, for all his faith and assurances.
“You lead an army against the Telmarines and won,” Susan points out. Even if it is true that she never wanted to be queen, she still seems to take all the advantages of being a monarch in her stride.
“I lead an army that slaughtered my own people,” Caspian murmurs flatly, turning to his horse, the crown heavy on his head. “And anyway, it was not my victory.”
“I didn’t kill the White Witch,” Peter tells him.
Caspian swallows.
“Aslan knows what he’s doing,” Lucy says peaceably. “Come on.”
Managing to return her toothy smile, Caspian rides out into the sunlight.
+
The Council Chamber was designed to be impenetrable, and to a certain extent it was; though no one had reckoned on an eleven year-old-boy wanting to get in. Caspian found a place to conceal himself; it was the days before he grew, and they weren’t looking for him anyway.
Men argued over things that made no sense to Caspian, and he thought that perhaps he’d been mistaken in thinking that ruling was all about glamour and excitement. Still, he stayed quiet and hidden as the Councillors left, until only a few men remained.
“And how is our prince? Will Caspian be ready to take the throne?”
Uncle Miraz’ laughter was cool and sour. “I do not believe he will ever be ready. He is weak.”
Caspian waited until they had all gone, boots ringing on the icy stone floors, before unfolding himself from his hiding-place, hot tears stringing down his cheeks.
+
Caspian walks the castle hall with Peter, the long room full of portraits, all the way back to the first days of Telmarine rule.
“Am I supposed to call them all traitors now?” Caspian asks, voice ringing out in the silence. He wants to take the crown off - it’s so very heavy - but he’s gained it now so he can’t. “Am I supposed to turn against them?”
“They did what they thought was right,” Peter replies, tone hushed. Outside, the celebrations continue. Caspian doesn’t want to think about how many of the ordinary people singing and drinking wouldn’t care if it were him or Miraz on the throne; he needs to believe that he can take Narnia forward.
“But it was wrong,” Caspian mumbles, footsteps echoing on the cool stone floors, looking up at the line of faces with his eyes, his chin, his mouth. “What do I do?”
His throat feels tight, his eyes are stinging. The stern face of Caspian the Ninth gazes down at him, and Caspian realises how much he does not know his father. How much he does not want to know his father. If he had lived, would Caspian be the king he is now? Or would he be like Miraz, leaving the remnants of the Narnians to hide in the forest?
“Your father would be proud of you,” Peter says quietly, fingers clenched almost too tight around Caspian’s shoulder.
Caspian shakes his head, shrugging off the contact. “No, he wouldn’t.”
+
The sky darkens, and coloured gunpowder signifies the start of his reign. People are dancing and singing and barrels of beer have been flowing merrily for hours. Caspian discovers the dull, nervous edge slips when he’s consumed enough of the sweet mead that people seem to insist on thrusting at him.
Edmund and Lucy are weaving slightly, their first, childish attempts at drinking alcohol merely making them sleepy and giggly. They seem happy enough, laughing in warm shivers of sound. Susan regards them with amusement, though she’s made no effort to curb their celebrating. They’re all still alive, and sometimes that seems nothing short of a miracle.
“I think I’m drunk,” Peter murmurs, a crooked smirk on his lips. Caspian hasn’t seen him in at least three hours, and Peter really could have been doing anything in that time. Caspian says nothing, sliding from his sitting position until his back is against the cold castle flagstones, counting the stars amongst the flashes of fiery light.
“Oh, Pete,” Susan sighs, somewhere above him.
+
“When will I be old enough to be king?” Caspian was twelve, and bored with schoolwork and people who were obediently deferential but who never let him do what he wanted. For some reason, he hadn’t yet managed to learn that being king did not mean sitting around all day eating sweet ices and getting other people to do your lessons for you.
The corners of Cornelius’ eyes crinkled in a tired fashion, as they did more and more these days. The Councillors were dwindling in number, and Caspian had rather thought that they were all there to rule on his behalf until it was his turn. But Lord Belisar was brought home from a hunting trip two weeks ago with an unfortunate crossbow bolt in his back, and how long would Caspian have to wait?
“My prince, you may never become king,” Cornelius told him, in a voice that sounded so cracked with age and exhaustion that it didn’t sound like his any more. “Surely you must have realised by now that Lord Miraz is ruling this kingdom in all but name?”
(Oh, childhood naïveté.)
+
“How long will you stay, do you think?” Caspian asks. He and Peter are propped against the castle courtyard wall, sharing a jug of rather potent wine between them; revellers surround them, there are bonfires blazing and songs and Caspian is reasonably certain that he does not want to know what those two palomino centaurs are doing in the shadows.
Peter shrugs easily, crooked smile inching up his face.
“I don’t know,” he admits. “This is better than Latin, anyway. And Geography. And Arithmetic.”
Caspian frowns.
“But you are a king,” he says slowly.
“Not where I come from.” Peter laughs; the sound is blurred and heavy. “Where I come from I’m just a skinny, friendless schoolboy.”
“But War Drobe-” Caspian begins a little plaintively; reality is always so much less glamorous than legends make it seem.
“Don’t be stupid,” Peter mutters, rolling his head to look at Caspian. “I don’t come from some special place called War Drobe, I came through a wardrobe. Where you keep clothes? I walked into a wardrobe and came out in Narnia. That’s it. Then it turned out there was a prophecy, and Edmund got himself kidnapped, and before we knew it I was leading Aslan’s armies. That’s it. That’s all. There’s no secret city of heroes in another world, just cupboards and underground stations and mad old professors in country houses.”
Caspian thinks that he might be sick.
“You proved yourself,” he mutters at last.
“Do you want to know what I was doing in the minutes before you blew that horn?” Peter demands, eyes glinting with reflected firelight. “I was getting my sodding head kicked in by some stupid little boys.” They both watch the sky for a moment or two, an uncomfortable silence stewing. “You’ll make at least as good a king as I did,” Peter offers.
The reassurance no longer matters, and Caspian would walk away if it weren’t for the fact he suspects he’ll fall over if he tries to move.
“Please don’t talk any more,” he murmurs, fingers curling into fists against the flagstones.
+
When Caspian was little, and so very alone, he imagined himself a friend to walk the dark halls of the castle with. The stories Cornelius told him were rich and bright, vivid tales of a land that sounded nothing like Narnia, but he picked through them and chose High King Peter to be his friend. Running alone through the castle courtyard, he imagined Peter running beside him. Noble, brave and strong, Peter was everything that Caspian hoped he might be one day. With Peter by his side, Caspian had nothing and no one to be afraid of.
He would be High King Peter’s closest friend, and no one would ever ignore him again. No one would leave him shut up in cold, dark rooms, and everyone would want to talk to him and help him. Caspian clung onto this fantasy because, after his mother died, he had no one in the world but Cornelius, and he would never get too close for fear of the consequences.
To say that he was disappointed when he actually met Peter, and found him to be a boy of his own age and just as fallible as anyone, would be an understatement. And he would never admit to anyone how much it stung when Peter brushed him easily aside, and treated Caspian the way he had always been treated; not as a friend, or as anyone who could offer anything. Just a necessary nuisance, who would have to be tolerated in case he turned out to be useful one day.
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“Have you seen Peter?” Susan asks. Her dark hair curls across her bared shoulders, but she has refrained from the worst of the celebrations, and she is clear-voiced and steady on her feet. Caspian is obscurely angry and permanently anxious and has drunk more than is sensible because of these facts, and is therefore staggering along the hall clinging onto tapestries and stones in the hopes of staying upright.
“No,” he murmurs, fingers skidding against the wall, and he nearly trips over his boots.
Susan sighs. She forcibly dragged Edmund and Lucy off to bed hours ago, and now it seems she wants to be the responsible sister for Peter too. Caspian hates the whole family right now, for being what he isn’t and for doing it all so effortlessly, and so keeps walking, determinedly fitting one foot before the other.
“You stupid, stupid boy,” Susan murmurs, and Caspian could point out that he’s just about older than her and he’s king now, but he can’t get that many words out. Instead, he allows Susan to pull him away from the wall, loop his arm around her shoulders, and half-carry him down the hall.
He’s already undignified and exhausted; he can hardly make it worse.
+
Caspian should have insisted that the castle could not have been taken, that it was too well-defended, that there were always going to be variables. That Peter was running on assumptions of a Narnia that didn’t exist any longer. That Miraz would do whatever it took and that all Peter would be doing would be proving a point of martyrdom.
He didn’t fight hard enough. And the creatures of his childhood stories were slaughtered before his eyes, just to emphasise the point.
Later, Peter blaming him seemed to make perfect sense. Everything that Caspian had ever trusted in and believed in had turned against him, his childhood curling up into sour lies that could not be swallowed. Lives had been lost; and so had most of his spirit.
Even now, he’s not sure how whole he can pretend to be.
+
“You need to stop this,” Susan informs Caspian, pushing him down on a bed in a room somewhere that is not his own - his uncle had Caspian’s four-poster shot to pieces all in the name of progress.
Somehow, Caspian is still wearing his crown, though it’s somewhat haphazard on his hair now. He pulls it off, and it rolls across the covers. He fumbles for it, but Susan’s steady hands curl around the gold.
“You are a king,” she informs him calmly. “Aslan believes in you, the people believe in you, even Pete believes in you, though he’ll never admit it. It doesn’t matter if you believe in yourself or not. You have to let that go.”
Caspian laughs bitterly, and wonders if it was all so easy for her.
“I am not a hero,” he mumbles, “And it was not my victory.”
“That doesn’t matter any more,” Susan tells him. “Just look forwards, and everyone will forget about the past.”
Caspian rolls onto his side, and pulls a pillow over his head.
+
Caspian’s seventeenth birthday was overshadowed by Lady Pruniprismia announcing her pregnancy.
“Pray for a girl,” Cornelius advised on stifling summer afternoons, as Caspian pored over sums and history and law and astronomy.
“Why?” Caspian asked, fingertips smeared with black ink. Uncle Miraz referred to him as bookish, shy and dull; Caspian listened at doorways and in passages and could yet make no sense of half of what he heard.
“If Miraz has a son, he has a successor,” Cornelius replied, flicking through one of the thick books of Telmarine law that Caspian was unsuccessfully studying.
“But I am his successor,” Caspian said, and then it all finally slotted into place. “Oh.”
“Pray,” Cornelius repeated. “And hope. I fear for you, if he should have a son.”
Miraz rubbed Pruniprismia’s growing stomach, laughed most of the time, and tightened castle security. Caspian was not allowed to leave the walls; he gazed out at the orchards and their ripe fruit longingly, wistfully stared across the plains. Even made of cool stone, the castle was swelteringly hot on summer nights, and he began to feel ever more trapped, as the months slid past.
“What will we do, if Lord Miraz has a son?” Caspian asked, but only once.
Cornelius removed his eyeglasses, and shook his head. “I do not know, my prince.”
+
Sliding in and out of exhaustion, Caspian lies in the dark. Outside the walls, the celebrations continue; they may never stop. Caspian can no longer remember what they’re celebrating, but his right hand is curled tight around a thick golden crown, so hard that it’s left marks on his palm.
“Mine,” he mumbles incoherently, and can’t make himself believe it.
Susan obviously does not know the castle as Caspian does, and so when she does eventually find Peter she leads him to the same room. Peter’s face is still swollen with battle bruising, and he is unsteady on his feet.
“Grow up, Pete,” Susan is murmuring. “For the last year you’ve been acting like a spoilt child.”
“I was a king,” Peter mutters back. “A king, Su.”
Susan sighs, face illuminated only by moonlight. She looks beautiful and unattainable, before she scowls once more, dragging Peter over to the bed and pushing him on. Caspian rolls away, still angry with Peter for not being the person he so childishly wished him to be, and Susan makes another soft sound of frustration.
“Get some sleep,” she advises, and slams the door.
After a while, Caspian asks: “Is she always like that?”
Peter laughs; it sounds a little like he’s choking. “Sometimes she’s worse.”
+
Caspian dreams of murders, of the paintings of his father going up in flames. He dreams of his father’s blood on the throne room floor, and Miraz smearing his fingers over the slick-wet red blade of his sword. He dreams of the crown being wrenched from his hands, of Telmarines take whatever they want, of the bloody, blank faces of the people he let down.
In the morning, Peter is puffy-eyed and sick-looking, and Caspian can’t hear his own thoughts over the headache that threatens to split his skull open.
“Morning, your majesty,” Peter murmurs, baring his teeth in an approximation of a smile.
“Shut up,” Caspian responds, burying his face in the blanket, and drifting back towards sleep again.
+
“You were always my favourite,” Caspian murmurs later, when a tired-looking courtier brings them tea and toast. He and Peter have managed to remove their boots and are both sitting under the blankets, because however stupid and compromising this situation looks, they both drank too much last night, and they’re in hurt.
“What do you mean?” Peter asks, crumbs across his shirt and jam on his fingers, he looks more like a child than ever. Caspian can’t help the smirk that steals across his mouth when he notices that.
“The legends of my childhood,” Caspian explains, throat scalded from hot tea. “Magic creatures and kings and queens and Aslan. High King Peter was always my favourite.”
“Oh.” Peter looks away, guilt on his face. “And I told you-”
“It was no worse than some of the other truths I’ve found out this week,” Caspian shrugs. Trying not to make it matter.
“I’m a bastard,” Peter decides.
Caspian grins toothily at him. “No more so than usual.”
+
As a boy, all Caspian really wanted was to belong, and to be loved. Brought up away in quiet, cold rooms with a disinterested father who soon became dead, and a mother who seemed to wilt like a flower as the winters passed, he learned of the world from Cornelius. Caspian is not a true Telmarine (he has not the sentiment, Miraz spat to the Council, he doesn’t understand what it is to be a Telmarine. He is soft and weak and will be a boy all his life) and it may have saved him this time, but it may not next time.
There will be a next time. Things are still fluidly uncertain, and enough lives have been lost for traces of anger and despair to linger.
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“You will leave soon, won’t you.” Caspian mumbles flatly. He should leave this room, wash and dress, try and look more like a king rather than a callow youth who had rather more wine than was at all sensible last night.
“I don’t want to,” Peter says.
“You’ll go,” Caspian decides, picking at threads in the quilt. He doesn’t add: and I’ll be all alone again because that’s a childish insecurity he’s going to suppress. It’s entirely possible to be alone while surrounded by people, as it turns out, but that is one of those things that can’t mean anything any more.
Peter smiles feebly; it doesn’t reach his eyes, and there’s a smudge of red jam on his top lip that keeps him a boy and not a legend.
“You remind me of me, you know,” he remarks.
“I kind of wish I didn’t,” Caspian tells him, not taking his eyes off the blanket.
“It’s not that much of a bad thing,” Peter says, sounding rather smug.
“You would say that.”
Peter laughs knowingly, which makes Caspian look up, and he’s about to say you have jam on your mouth just to shut him up when Peter surprises him by leaning in a little too close, knowing smirk dissolving. He wants to pull away because your childhood idolatries are never meant to become adult desires, but he doesn’t.
Caspian’s mouth opens and he doesn’t know what to say, but then it turns out that Peter is no longer interested in speaking and that, too, makes a kind of tired sense.
(And someone kisses first, but later on they’ll both swear blind it was the other; just something else to become lost and twisted by history and the mutual refusal to remember.)
+
Later, Peter turns the crown over in his hands. He’s too young for nostalgia, but momentarily the look on his face is that of the man he was once, thirteen hundred years ago.
“Tell me something,” Caspian says. “Tell me something before you leave.”
“I’m not leaving yet,” Peter mumbles, lost between the man he was and the boy he has to be and the man he will become, given time. He sighs. “Fine. I want your throne, I want you, and I want to stay here for the foreseeable future.”
“Oh.” Caspian smiles tiredly.
“Yes, oh.” Peter hands back the crown; it seems to have grown in weight. “I think that’s what growing up is,” he decides.
“Not getting what you want?” Caspian asks.
“It’s more than that.” Peter sighs. “It’s… ripping apart your shirt to find that your brother’s already carrying a torch, it’s leading an army into battle only to hand the prize over to someone else, it’s getting hundreds killed only to find if you’d just believed your little sister everyone would have lived.” His mouth twists. “It’s discovering that the magical paradise you believed in for a year has grown up without you and stopped being what you thought it was.”
“Your uncle killed your father and no one saw fit to tell you until the worst possible moment,” Caspian adds. “And someone else fights the one-on-one battle for your kingdom against your uncle.”
They both trail into silence.
“I think I’d like to stop growing up now,” Caspian decides.
“Me too,” Peter mumbles, handing back the crown. “Me bloody too.”
+
“I think that you’re Hamlet,” Edmund decides over lunch.
He and Lucy look a little tired and sick, but they’re brightening up considerably, and no doubt they’ll soon be sneaking drinks from the bottles they’ve been instructed not to touch in the way that all children do. Caspian has fond memories of the castle’s wine cellars, and slightly less fond memories of vomiting in the courtyard a few hours later. Now, though, there’s no one to beat him for drinking the wine that had been there for decades, being saved for some kind of special occasion, and Doctor Cornelius will no longer give him the disappointed expressions of a teacher let down by his student.
Caspian is king now. He can do as he wishes. And yet he knows that he can’t; there is almost too far left to go.
“I do not know who Hamlet is,” Caspian replies calmly. He is unable to look at Peter, and it is entirely possible that he will never be able to eat jam again, but Susan is smiling knowingly. Her dark hair waves loosely around her shoulders, but she looks resigned, as though she too understands that the cost can sometimes overshadow the actual result.
“It’s a story where we come from,” Peter explains quickly. He’s smiling. “Ed, I think you’re right.”
Edmund just laughs, and Caspian could ask for clarification, and he could even enquire if they were ever visited by Hamlet just so they’d know what it feels like to be harassed by your childhood fables, but he remains quiet.
Peter smiles sweetly at him across the table, expression resigned; Aslan wants to speak to him and Susan this afternoon.
+
Father’s blood on the throne room floor would have been an impossibility because Miraz preferred secluded shadows to an outward murder. Nonetheless, Caspian imagines red to be seeping across the stone, and he wonders how many Telmarine kings stood where he stands now only because they slaughtered their fathers, brothers, uncles and cousins. Whether their entire lineage is based purely on cloak and dagger, on knives and poisons and cruel, enigmatic smiles. Something to be proud of, no?
“Smile,” Peter calls teasingly from the doorway.
“What are you doing here?” Caspian asks, turning with more anger than he means to. He swallows, trying to soften his tone. “Shouldn’t you be with Aslan?”
“In a minute,” Peter shrugs, easing the door closed and walking across to join him. “I think I already know what he’s going to tell me.”
“You have to leave,” Caspian guesses.
“I think so,” Peter agrees. “Which is a shame, as I’m sure I’ve got a Latin test when I get back, and your uncle knocked all the subjunctives out of my head.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Caspian says a little desperately. His laugh cracks in the middle.
“It doesn’t matter,” Peter replies.
They stand in silence for a moment, and this would be the time to say a proper goodbye before it’s too late; but they don’t have the capacity to make themselves that vulnerable to each other again. Things are still a little too sharp (they always will be).
+
Doctor Cornelius first told Caspian about Aslan when he was around six and waiting for a broken arm to heal (his first fall off a horse; his mother sang him songs in the language of Telmar that no one speaks any more, and Uncle Miraz merely sneered while feigning sympathy for propaganda). It was a hot summer evening, and Caspian’s shirt stuck to his skin, while the sling that held his arm itched awkwardly.
“He knows everything,” Cornelius explained, “And there is nothing that he is incapable of.”
“Then why did he leave?” Caspian enquired, too young to realise that his question was the one that must never be asked.
Cornelius said nothing, but his eyes glittered in the candlelight, bright and sad. From then on, he only ever mentioned Aslan in passing, if he appeared in another of the old Narnia tales, and in time Caspian all but forgot about him.
+
That evening, with the Kings and Queens of Old returned to their own land (and, Caspian adds inside his own head, to their schooling; everywhere but here they’re just children, after all, for all that their subjects would never believe it), Caspian takes his new crown and his new sword and walks through the dusk to the crypt.
Aslan’s How, even half-collapsed from Telmarine trebuchets, puts the Royal Family Tomb to shame, but nonetheless the high stone ceilings are beautiful and cool. Caspian’s boots echo on the floor, just one set of feet, and he remembers once again how alone he is. Acknowledging it doesn’t make it easier. Caspian the First’s grave is starting to crumble a little, but he bows for respect anyway, leaving a blood-red flower as is tradition.
There have been many Telmarine kings over the last thirteen hundred years, and Caspian leaves flowers at each tomb because he may despise them and hate them for making his life harder, but they are still his ancestors. Work has begun on a grave in black marble for King Miraz the First; it is only right that these things are observed. Only then can healing begin.
King Caspian the Ninth lies beneath a stone slab with a statue of himself laid out on top. The statue looks peaceful, the white stone barely darkened. Caspian has not been down here for a long time; a faded length of scarlet ribbon has been tied neatly around the statue’s neck; perhaps Miraz thought it a joke. Caspian makes no move to undo it, merely scatters white flowers over the tomb. His mother lies beside his father, arms folded over her stone chest, and Caspian covers her in purple flowers.
With Lady Pruniprismia gone, and Miraz and his parents dead, Caspian is left alone in the world. He stares down at the carving of his father, and wonders if it is accurate; if this is what the man he can scarcely remember looked like. He thinks that the statue has a nose of a similar shape to his own, but it seems ridiculous to speculate. Instead, Caspian unsheathes his new sword (When Aslan bares his teeth, Winter meets its death), presses the tip to the stone floor, and kneels for the sake of honour.
“Father,” he says, and Telmarines have traditions as fervent as the Narnians do. And it is said, of course, that a new king can speak to his ancestors at the very beginning of his reign, and they will hear. It is a mere superstition that Caspian has never believed, but then Queen Susan’s horn turned out to work, so perhaps there is some form of magic in this cold stone crypt after all.
“Father,” he begins again, mouth suddenly dry. “You were naïve.” He thinks again for a moment. “No, you weren’t naïve, you were stupid.”
The statue doesn’t move, and makes no sign that it has heard, which is, on the whole, a relief.
“…But I think that I might be stupid too,” Caspian admits, because there’s no one left to say it to. “And I believe things might work out fine in spite of that.”
Behind him, just for a second, he thinks he hears Peter laugh.
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