I Know it in My Memory for aurilly
Title: I Know it in My Memory
Author: vialethe
Recipient: aurilly
Rating: G
Possible Spoilers/Warnings: Implied Susan/Edmund
Summary: He can't hold onto her any more in England than he ever could in Narnia, no matter how he tries; still, they've never given up on each other yet.
I Know it in My Memory
He keeps stumbling in on his sister in the bath.
It isn't the worst part of living with her on their own, not by far (she never takes a turn at doing the washing up, for one), but still, this is the second time it's happened, and it's developing the potential to become embarrassing.
“I might begin to think you're doing this on purpose, Ed,” Susan says, looking up at him from the white froth of her bath, steam rising like a veil around her.
She has her hair up, but bits of it have escaped, sticking to her neck with damp, and for a moment he can almost hear the crashing of waves, can nearly smell salt in the air. He wants to say to her, do you remember, but those are not words he says to Susan; those are not words anyone says to Susan, not these days.
Instead he turns away, and watches her face framed in the mirror, blurred by a mist of condensation. “Don't flatter yourself.”
For a moment, he thinks she won't respond, this sister he can no longer make out clearly; but then she puts out her tongue and flicks her toes, splashing him like a child.
“You used to be such a proper lady,” he says with mock disapproval, reaching for her towel.
“Never with you,” she says. “With everyone else, but not you, Ed.” It sounds like hope, but when he turns to look, her eyes are closed, her lashes a fragile barrier she knows he wouldn't ever break, not for all the magic in Narnia.
***
“Oh no, not you, Ed!” Susan says, upon seeing his approach to the harbor below Cair Paravel. “I'm quite certain Peter was meant to join me.”
“He was,” Edmund answers, staring up at the bright hull of Narnia's newest ship, the galleon Splendour Hyaline. “Unfortunately, his grace the High King has been called away to deal with a border dispute between the Giants in the north, so you're stuck with me instead. I hope it isn't too much of a disappointment.”
“It isn't that,” she says, and puts her hand on his arm, as if to say, and you know it. She has always been that way, taking everything to heart, unable to let things bounce off her, like Lucy, or deflect them like Peter. He can never decide whether he loves this trait of hers or hates it.
“It's just that you get so seasick,” she continues, making him rethink that assessment. “I don't wish to spend the entire voyage mopping your brow and murmuring soothing platitudes.”
“I was only seasick that once, and I was eleven years old at the time!” He doesn't look, but he can feel the quiver in her fingers as she fights back laughter. “And in any case, they've assured me the seas should be perfectly calm this time of year between Narnia and the Lone Islands. There will be absolutely no brow-mopping required, thank you very much.”
“I shall hold you to that,” she says, and smiles up at him, looking as pure and sweet as the clear blue waters at their feet. “And,” she adds over her shoulder, as she turns to board the ship, “you will, of course, tell me the true reason you're here in place of Peter.”
Sometimes he wonders how much of the bond between them is based on this, on the talent they have for discovering secrets, for drawing out information. Sometimes he simply wonders exactly when they began to use it on each other.
*
The deck is crowded with all manner of Narnians; Fauns, Dwarves, Minotaurs (surprisingly good sailors, and tireless rowers besides), a few Wolves (Susan's honor guard), a human or two, an entire flock of Seabirds, and one large black Bear no one could quite remember having invited along.
Susan pours wine over the bow, letting it run down to the sea, asking the blessing of sea and sky for the ship's first voyage, before taking in the chaos on deck and making a tactical retreat to her cabin.
“I hope that wasn't an inferior vintage, sister dear,” Edmund says, following her without invitation. “I don't mean to end up drowned because we fed sour wine to the sea.” Truthfully, the deck is rolling only a little, and his stomach is steady; still, it never hurt to consider every aspect.
“No more sour than you, Ed,” she says, and he reaches out, tugging at her plaits in retaliation.
She protests and squirms and attacks all his most ticklish spots in return, but he doesn't stop until her pins are scattered and her hair tumbles thick and free around her face.
“There,” he says, grinning. “Now you look fit for the sea.”
She laughs, breathless, and her hair slips through his fingers like smoke.
*
A week out and the decks have been cleared, the stores stowed away, and a regular, routine sense of peace has settled over the ship.
He finds Susan at sunset, sitting at the stern, watching the sun sink into the sea. She has let herself slowly come unbound as they sail to the East; her dress is simple, her feet bare, hair lifting behind her in the breeze.
“I love this ship,” she says when he sits down beside her, stroking the wood of the deck with her fingertips as though it were a cat. “There are so many possibilities in a ship; one never knows what might happen when you set sail.”
“Yes,” he says. “You might end up becalmed, or attacked by pirates, or any number of horrible things.” He's learned to love the sea, really, to love the taste of salt on his lips, the swell of the waves, the creaking sounds of the ship breathing and flexing around them, but there's something to be said for keeping up appearances.
“Don't be such a brat,” she says, jostling his shoulder. He might have known better than to think he could still fool her. Lucy might have believed him for a moment, or Peter, both of them too truthful and open to see falsehood, however innocent, in others. But not Susan; she is too much like him, the blind spots in his reflection. “Think of all the places we might go,” she says, and he tries, wanting to match her, to make her smile.
“We might sail out to the city of the Merfolk,” he says, “and see if the waters truly are as clear as they say.”
“We might sail up the coast, and put in at every port, and collect all of our friends until we make a party at sea.”
Privately, Edmund thinks being trapped at sea on an increasingly full ship sounds like the opposite of an enjoyable time, but he knows better than to say so. “I might take you to the ends of the world, or Calormen, or Telmar, all the places we've never been.”
She is silent for a moment, and the wind shifts, blowing her hair between them like a curtain, hiding her face.
“You might take me to my wedding in this ship.” Her voice has changed, all the natural cheer and warmth of a moment ago vanished into something false and brittle; to others, maybe, she would sound the same, but his ears are more finely tuned.
“I might save you from a wedding in this ship,” he responds, trying to maintain the levity in his own voice, trying to keep the peace whole as long as she will.
He is certain he sounds as false as she.
The wind blows her hair again over her face, and she makes a frustrated sound, pushing it back, twisting it between her hands. “We can't go on as we are forever, Ed.”
“I don't see why not,” he says. The curve of her neck is exposed; he imagines he can see her heartbeat fluttering just under her skin, a nervous rhythm in concert with his own. “There are four thrones in Cair Paravel. I don't think we're meant to leave.”
“So we're just meant to stay there forever, to never change, to remain alone? I don't think that's what Aslan would want.”
Edmund has long since given up on guessing what Aslan would want, if he had ever begun. That is his faith; to trust in his own judgment, to trust that inspiration and enlightenment will come when needed.
Susan's faith has always been apart from his, something closely held and fiercely protected. She's fairly glowing with it now, bathed golden by the last rays of the sun, beautiful and willful and proud.
“No,” he says. Their hands nearly brush, set so close together on the deck; a tiny knot in the wood lays between their fingers, a flaw no bigger than a hummingbird's egg. “I don't think we're meant to be alone at all.”
“Oh, Ed-” she sighs, as the sun slips below the horizon at last, and he decides that he doesn't wish to hear what she has to say, not now - at some point in the future, perhaps, but not now, not with the memory of the gold light around them and that sense of peace still hanging in the air.
“What's all this talk of weddings, anyhow?” he interrupts. “Did the Duke of Galma ask you to marry him again?”
She flashes him a look, but he's finding the waves quite fascinating, keeping his eyes fixed on their swell.
“Yes,” she says, and the natural cheer is back in her voice, probably in spite of herself. “The poor dear, he must be eighty if he's a day, but it never does stop him from trying his luck. I'm not certain if he hopes I'll change my mind or if he simply forgets he's already asked.”
“He has hope,” Edmund says, leaning back to watch the first stars appear overhead, remembering how she'd looked at the feast on Galma, with white gems shining in her hair. “No one could ever forget asking such a thing of you.”
***
When she finally emerges from the bath (having been kicked out long ago, Edmund has taken up a strategic position in his favorite overstuffed leather chair, which he'd liberated from their father's study upon moving), her hair is impeccably styled into perfect waves, not a strand out of place.
It's too rigid, he thinks, and too harsh, like the bright red that marks her mouth, like the shiny black of her long-coveted brand new shoes, clicking their way across the hall.
“Going out then?” he asks, as she pauses by the door to put on her coat.
“Yes,” she says, and doesn't look his way, not for an instant.
“Anyone I know?” he says, cycling through in his mind all the things he currently hates; his age, the slenderness of his frame (which stubbornly refuses his efforts to fill it out), the lack of a sword at his hip, every single male in the city not named Pevensie.
“No.” All of her attention is on the buttons of her coat, as though they've grown more difficult to fasten, or fingers he's seen pick a hundred locks have turned clumsy.
Her fingers are on the latch before she finally meets his eyes. “And for heaven's sake, Edmund, don't wait up for me.”
She's gone before he can speak, leaving only a gust of cold air and the scent of her perfume behind.
By rights it should be cloying, he thinks. The scent of it should be heavy, to match her painted lips and her carefully set hair, her dresses that fit just so.
But it isn't; it's light and slightly spicy, like citrus trees in bloom. He doesn't know how she manages it here, but she smells, as she always has, of Narnia in summer.
That, at least, hasn't changed, and he breathes it in long after it's faded from the air around him.
***
Disaster finally strikes some three weeks out, as they're nearing the Lone Islands.
It is Susan's idea, when land first comes into view, to picnic on Felimath. “Even my legs are growing weary of being at sea,” she says, stretching up on her toes, clinging to the bow rail as the waves surge against the prow. “I can't imagine how you've tolerated it.”
“With the help of copious amounts of honey mead,” Edmund says, sliding up next to her, letting the motion of the waves shift them together and apart. “I've been thoroughly drunk every hour since we left Redhaven, haven't you noticed?”
“Strange that I should still have found a bottle to take with us on our picnic, then,” she says, her eyes sparkling with the sort of mischief usually reserved for escapades with Lucy and the Dryads (escapades he and Peter are forbidden from so much as asking about, as it happens). “You do hold your liquor well,” she continues, studying him, eyes narrowed thoughtfully in the sunlight, “but not well enough to fool me. I know perfectly well it was that dreadful Bear who drank all the mead the governor gave us, you needn't think to protect him.”
“I suppose his snoring was somewhat difficult to miss.” The Bear (who went by the name of Bolger) had, in fact, spent two days afterward sleeping in the hold, with sticky fur and a bottle still clutched between his paws.
Somehow it is Bolger who ends up weighing down the rowboat with them (looking sleepy still, but fiercely guarding the picnic basket), as Edmund and Susan take up the oars.
“I've always enjoyed Felimath,” she says, as the soft green shores come into view. “It's so peaceful there.”
“Of course it's peaceful,” Edmund says, between pulls of the oar. “There's nothing there but sheep - and a shepherd who pops over once in a while to count them.” The Splendour Hyaline, much too large to come in close to the harbor-less island, dwindles slowly, turning to head into Doorn, where they would meet up with her once more.
They have just reached the halfway point between land and ship when the gale blows up out of the east, swift and sudden, slamming into the sea like a curse conjured up from the depths.
That wine must have been sour after all, is all Edmund has time to think, before the boat rocks and flips, and Bolger's roar blends with the roar of the sea in his ears, and the only solid thing in his world is Susan's hand, clinging to his arm, keeping them afloat.
*
“I used to love songs and tales of adventure,” Susan says, what seems like a hundred water-logged years later, as Edmund coughs up what he's certain must be a third gallon of seawater from his burning lungs. “They aren't quite so wonderful when you're in the midst of them, though.”
“Almost drowning,” Edmund says, between coughs, “hardly counts as an adventure. I do hope poor old Bolger made it ashore all right.”
There's no sign of the Bear anywhere nearby; indeed, there's no sign of anything on the shore where they washed up but themselves, and the splintered bits of wood he assumes had once been their boat.
Susan, sitting beside him, seems to have fared much better than himself; she's soaked to the skin, of course, but she at least is upright and alert, scanning the sea through the veil of rain. He watches as she pushes her hair back, a few strands stubbornly clinging to the skin of her throat, watches the curve of her mouth, a coral colored spot in an otherwise grey and bloodless world.
“Anyhow,” he says, coughing still, tasting the sea crossing his lips again, “I thought you liked all the romantic ballads and such. It's Lucy who loves the adventures.”
The set of her mouth seems firmer now, that prim look she used to get so long ago when someone had misremembered a lesson they ought to have learned well. “No,” she says, shading her eyes with her hand. “Lucy loved the beautiful damsels and the brave knights. I loved the Horses who ran to freedom, or the Mermaid who grew legs for love of the land.” He doesn't know how he could have tangled his sisters together so in his mind; just because these days it is Lucy who likes to take a turn in the training yards, and Susan who is more inclined to be still and observe.
“Whatever is that?” she says, watching something small and dark tumble along in the path of the waves. Too tired to protest, Edmund simply watches as she darts out into the lessening rain, and returns in weary triumph with her prize.
“Our basket has survived!” she proclaims, and it does look to be fairly intact, if liberally festooned with seaweed. Inside, they find the bread and meats quite spoiled, but there are pears and oranges, and, best of all-
“By Aslan's Mane! The honey mead came through,” Edmund says, pulling out the bottle, perfectly intact.
The rain slackens further as they eat, until soon enough it stops altogether, the storm sinking back into the waves as quickly as it had risen.
“We ought to wait here, I think,” Susan says. “I believe I can see Doorn not far off to the left there, and the ship will surely come about to search for us before long.”
“It's not quite the picnic you had in mind, I'll wager,” he says, lying on his back, munching on a pear. “But still, not half bad. Granted, I'll not be engaging you to plan further outings after what's happened, but-”
“Oh, do be quiet, Ed,” she says, turning to him with a smile that manages to be both fond and exasperated, all blended together. When he open his mouth to speak again, she pops a piece of orange between his lips, her fingers brushing along the stubble shadowing his chin.
He tastes the citrus on his tongue, sweet and tart both, and grins.
*
Some hours later, the moon has begun its rise overhead, the bottle of honey mead sits mostly empty between them, and their attempts to build a fire have resulted in at least three squabbles, a great deal of smoke, and finally, a rather fitful flame.
“It's pretty, fire,” Susan says, somewhat unsteadily, from where she's tucked herself up against him, her head against his shoulder. “Just like the hair of that one granddaughter of the Duke's. Whatever was her name?”
Edmund stiffens, and drinks once more, feeling the liquor slide down his throat, a pleasant burn that takes some of the edge from the danger he's sensing. “I haven't the least idea,” he says. “Why should I?”
“She flirted shamelessly with you the entire time we were in port. You ought to have been kinder to her, she would make you a good wife.” Without looking, she snatches the bottle from his hand, and he lets it go without pursuit or comment, knowing he only has the energy for one fight at the moment.
“I don't want a wife. I'm perfectly happy as I am, thank you.”
“But if you married, there would be someone to take my place in Cair Paravel,” she says, still in that same dreamy, half-lost voice, and he wants badly to bring her back, to take her by the shoulders and force her to meet his eyes. He doesn't dare though, not quite, not even with the mead doing its work on him. Still, she must feel something of it, some shift in him, for she continues on hurriedly, “Or if Peter did, or Lucy. Why, if all four of us married and stayed in Narnia, there would be no room for us all!”
It is too much; far too much, and yet he can't say so, can't admit it out loud. “It isn't that easy to replace a piece of yourself,” is the best he can do, as he pushes away from her and reclaims the bottle, noting with disgust the tiny amount remaining, not nearly enough to get him as drunk as he suddenly wants to be. The cool of the night air seeps in between them, the heat of their small fire nothing in comparison to the shared warmth of their skin, and he pushes his free hand down into the sand, waiting for it to warm around him, to serve as a false, shifting blanket. “If you leave, it can't ever be the same, not for any of us.”
Susan doesn't speak in return, just buries her fingers in the sand next to his, the world shifting and sliding under his hand as she carves it out to suit herself.
We belong together, he wants to say. Instead, he says, “You belong with us,” looking not at her but at the waves, the white froth barely visible in the moonlight, racing up the shore towards them, but always receding, always running away.
“It isn't good to be so possessive,” Susan murmurs, and he can feel her fingers against his now, grains of sand catching and rubbing between them like inconvenient truths. “To love too fiercely, to want too much. We can't keep everything the same by pretending everything can go on as when we were children. It's our responsibility.”
Sand goes flying, like the pieces of what might pass for his numbed feelings, as he yanks his hand away from hers and stands, bottle still in hand. “Responsibility,” he says, quite carefully, “can go hang.”
She calls something after him as he stalks away, but he lets it pass over him, lets the sound of the sea drown her out, following a bend in the coastline until she is lost from sight when he turns back, and the world is open, and empty, and his.
It is sometime later, after he has finished off the bottle at last and left it stuck in the sands, that he becomes aware of the singing.
At first, even as he rises to follow it without quite understanding why, he thinks it is only Susan; but his sister, as sweet as her voice may be, never sounded anything like this.
Enchanting does not begin to describe it, he thinks, heading over the sands, feeling his feet sink and stumble as he goes. It is like a tapestry of sound, a world stitched together out of harmony and melody, someone singing him the very song of the world in a language he does not understand, but longs to know.
They are there when he reaches the shore, as he stumbles into the frigid waves of the ocean; three women, sitting on rocks just offshore, bare but for their hair, blowing around them in the breeze. One of them, he notes, has hair like ice, another like fire. The third has hair like smoke and mischief in her eyes, and it's she who reaches out her hand to him and opens her lips, a summon in song.
Somewhere in the back of his brain, a forgotten practical bit of him is yelling, Sirens, you fool! Back away, stop up your ears, do something!, but before him there is only the song, and temptation given voice and form.
The water is surging about his knees when an arm like an iron bar circles around his chest, and her voice speaks next to his ear, sounding harsh as the call of a crow.
“You leave him be!” Susan yells, trying to thrust him behind her, behind the bright flare of the torch she holds in her other hand. “You cannot have him!” Still, Edmund struggles forward, caught between the pull of the sea and the strength of her hold. On their rocks, the Sirens cock their heads in unison, and sing out a challenge that, though not phrased in any human language, is a clear question anyhow.
“Because,” Susan says, “he is mine.”
It is then that Edmund's trance snaps (as the Siren with ice in her hair laughs and sneers, and he shudders with memory), and he backs away through the waves, stumbling backward towards the shore with Susan at his back, his heart hammering under her hand as the Sirens surge up once more, and open their mouths (how could he have not seen those fangs, he wonders, or the blood on their lips) to deliver a command he knows they will be helpless against, even the two of them together.
They never hear it, though; instead there is a thumping behind them, the ground shaking beneath their feet, and a mighty roar fills his ears, a sound full of fury and not a bit of musicality at all.
Even Sirens, it seems, are taken aback by the sudden rush of a soggy, seven-foot tall Bear in full charge; they vanish beneath the waves before Bolger's paws so much as touch the water, and he turns back, looming over his sovereigns.
“Don't suppose you've got any of that honey stuff left?” the Bear asks, snuffling about Edmund's head in a most undignified manner, and there's nothing for it but to admit the mead is, in fact, gone. Luckily, Bolger is a steady sort of fellow, and settles down with a modicum of grumbling, letting Edmund and Susan curl up against him for the night.
“I'm sorry, Su,” he whispers to her, above the sound of snoring Bear. “I've been an awful fool.”
“Don't be,” she says through a yawn, tucked up against him once more, letting him feel safe and complete. “You didn't have a choice.” She reaches up blindly, and manages to pat him on the head; he catches her hand on its way down and brings her fingers to his lips.
Even over the scents of sea and sand and damp fur, they still smell of oranges.
***
It isn't that he's waited up on purpose; it's just that his book was so engrossing, and then there was the washing up to be done (of course), and such an intriguing programme on the radio that time kept creeping by, minute by endless minute, and finding him still awake.
He's smoking a cigarette in the shadows beside the doorway, telling himself that surely it must be warmer up against the wall, when he finally hears the sound he's been waiting for, the staccato tapping of Susan's heels on the pavement.
But their rhythm is off, too hurried, stuttering, sounding almost nervous. Susan's steps are never anything less than confident, no matter her world, no matter her situation; he frowns, and stubs out his cigarette, waiting in the shadows for her to turn the corner.
When she finally does, he sees there's a man beside her, his hand on her arm, and Edmund tightens his fist around his forgotten lighter so hard the edges dig into his skin.
He's about to step out and make himself known when she stops, several houses up the street. “This is quite far enough, thank you,” she says, and he recognizes the tone of her voice from endless diplomatic sessions, sweet politeness coating the steel underneath. “It's getting late, and I shouldn't like to keep you.”
The man says something in return, his voice too low for Edmund to make out, but he can hear the familiar tones of his sister's voice when she responds, “I've already told you, no.” There's only steel left now, and he grins to himself in the shadows.
Her companion responds with laughter, and leans in to say something in her ear that causes Susan to jerk back, turning towards the house before she's spun back by a hand on her arm, her gasp bit off, barely audible at this distance.
Edmund is hardly aware of leaving the shadows, of propelling himself away from the wall and onto the pavement before them; he knows she can defend herself, this gentle sister of his, but here she has no weapons but herself; no bow, no daggers, no titles or courtesies. There is only Susan, alone with all the confidence of a queen.
He reaches for her free hand, and there's no relief in her eyes - only a flash of something he can't name - but he hadn't expected it in any case. “Come on, Su.”
“Edmund, please,” she says. “Go back inside.” She's pale in the light of the streetlamps, leeched of color, stripped down to shades of grey, only the red of her mouth standing out like a wound.
“Who's this then?” the man asks, and Edmund still hasn't spared a glance for him, taking a careful survey of his sister's face and finding her still intact, still perfectly drawn.
“My brother,” Susan says, “but really, Ed-”
“Isn't that sweet,” her date says, smiling in a way that isn't sweet in the least. “Your baby brother's come out to defend your honor, love.”
Peter always said that time seemed slower in a fight, that everything ran at half the speed it should, but he's never agreed; for Edmund, time has always sped up into a horrible, sickening blur of movement, of his fist closing around the hard metal still in his hand, of the sweet sound of a cracking uppercut, of blood on his knuckles and Susan's voice hissing in his ear, “Enough, Ed!”
(Later, he will say it was the 'baby brother' that spurred him to it. They will both know it isn't so.)
His adrenaline doesn't slow until she's pulled him back into the flat, and he comes back to himself as she peers out the gap in the curtains, watching her date pick himself up off the pavement and stumble away.
“Well, that was very nicely done,” she says, turning to him, nothing of the controlled queen left in her voice at all. “I'd expect Peter to act like such a fool, but you! I can take care of myself, Edmund, I don't need you!”
He isn't certain what she sees in his face, the face that had once mirrored her own (“You should grow a beard,” she had said to him a lifetime ago, fingers tracing the smooth skin at his jaw), but she must feel something crumple and twist inside her the same as he does, because her lip trembles as he's not seen it do for years now.
He reaches for her, but she sinks before they connect, sitting abruptly on the floor, and he kneels beside her, hesitant until she takes his hand and rests her head on his shoulder.
“Why do I always choose so badly?” she says, her voice soft as her hair against his face, soft as the scent of Narnia still clinging stubbornly to her, as stubbornly as he wishes he could.
“You don't,” he murmurs into her crown, and, “you don't,” as he kisses her cheek and tastes salt on his lips, repeating it over and over, though they both know it's a lie, just as they both know the reasons.
“You never choose at all,” she says, so quietly he thinks perhaps it's only in his head.
“It's never been a choice for me,” he says; she says nothing, but her fingers grip his all the harder.
***
On their voyage home (which is mercifully uneventful), they stop once more at Galma, and this time it is Edmund who receives an offer of marriage, of a bride with fire in her hair and laughter in her wide green eyes.
He leaves her with courteous words and disappointment on the shores of her grandfather's island, and they sail for home with no more passengers than when they had began.
“Why did you choose to say no?” Susan asks, joining him at the rail, looking back to the vanishing shores of possibility.
“You know why,” he says, turning from the rail to look east, to Narnia and beyond.
*
“You will always fall in love with things you can't hold on to,” he says to her, in the dim light of her cabin, the night before they are due to make port once more in Narnia, “and then you will run before they can leave you.”
“That is a horrible prediction, Ed!” she says, sputtering with laughter, before she smacks him upside the head with a pillow.
“You told me I would end up in thrall to my dreams, until I was unsure what was reality!” he protests. “It seemed only fair.”
“Perhaps we shouldn't play this game; we aren't much good at it,” she says over the rim of her wineglass, her eyes huge and dark as she watches him, still with a smile on her lips.
“I'm sure we could think of something else,” he offers, and does not meet her gaze.
(Someday he will be a ghost to her, and she will choose him still. They will break each other, time and again, trying to hold on; he knows this in his bones.)
*
“I give in,” she says, as Cair Paravel grows ever larger in their sight, and the crew bustles around them, making preparations to dock. “You've kept your secret uncommonly well this time, brother.”
“Which secret would that be?” he asks, turning to her, noting with a pang that her hair is once more bound into its coronet, not a strand left to blow on the wind.
“Why it was you who came, and not Peter,” she answers. “You've exchanged no diplomatic correspondence, made no deals in private, negotiated nothing. Why come then, when you had no love of the sea and business to conduct at home?”
He considers teasing her, asking just how she would know for certain that none of her speculated dealings had taken place, but in the end, it isn't worth it; she would know it for a lie, as she always knows everything about him, even the things she refuses to admit aloud.
Just then, the wind gusts, warm as the breath of a lion, making the sails snap and dance, pulling a curl free from Susan's intricate style to drift around her face.
“I chose to come,” he says, brushing the errant curl back, his mouth against the shell of her ear, “because you would be here.”
When they land, Peter proclaims Susan more radiant than he has ever seen her, and says the voyage has done her good.
Susan smiles, and thanks him, and holds tight to Edmund's hand.
***
He is lying on the rug the next day, contemplating the map on their ceiling made of cracks and patches and spots when she appears besides him. Her feet are still damp from the bath, and she leaves a trail of steamy wet footprints on the floor behind her, the shape of her imprinted and left behind to dry up and fade away.
He doesn't bother turning his head until she sets something down beside it with a thump and settles herself beside him, nudging him to shove over and make room for her.
“It turns out our neighbors are Polish,” she says, as he eyes up the bottle between their heads, thick glass filled with a dark amber liquid, shining gold in the slanting afternoon sunlight. “I didn't ask where they'd managed to acquire it, but there you have it.”
“More to the point,” he asks, “how did you acquire it?”
Susan shrugs, and struggles with the cork, all her attention for the mead. “It turns out the wife wears the same size shoe as I do.”
“You didn't have to,” he says quietly, taking the bottle from her and popping the cork with ease. He knows what those shiny black shoes had meant to her, how long she had eyed them in the shop window, how she had scrimped and saved to buy them, how she had sighed to him when she first put them on, “They make me feel like a queen, Ed.”
“I owed you a debt,” she says, still lightly, still avoiding his eyes. “It seemed like the right choice.”
He hands her the bottle, and she finally meets his eyes as their fingers meet over the neck, holds his gaze as she tips it back and swallows. Her hair is loose, falling to her shoulders in its natural waves, her simple blue robe one he remembers well from Finchley, with her feet bare beneath it. If there were only a salt breeze, he thinks, everything would be perfect; but then, things never happen the same way twice.
“How many times did you save me? Consider it even,” he says, and takes an overzealous drink himself, a drop of mead running down his fuzzy, unshaven chin.
Susan laughs, and swipes it from the corner of his mouth with her thumb, pressing her skin to his lips for the briefest of moments.
He accepts it - all of it, the honey mead, her appearance, all and everything - as a mute apology, an admittance of secret memory, of knowledge, that she trusts him to uncover, as he always has.
There is golden light in her hair, and she tastes of sea salt and oranges.
What I want: I like stories that include: friendship, adventures, banter, daring stratagems, painting/sculpture/art, in vino veritas, fish out of water, the Wood Between the Worlds, and/or at least one chuckle. I prefer casual romance that develops out of friendship over angsty epic one true love; I like gen friendship stories just as much as romance. I love Edmund and Tirian the most, but everyone else, too.
Prompt words/objects/quotes/whatever:
1. Last Battle AU-ish. Instead of it being only a vision, Tirian is actually transported to the Friends of Narnia dinner and spends time in England. I ship Tirian/Jill, Eustace/Jill or Tirian/Susan, but ensemble gen would be just as wonderful.
2. Edmund & Tumnus as close friends through the years, in a way that isn’t dependent on Lucy and Tumnus's dynamic.
3. Lucy & Edmund on an adventure, without their siblings. Perhaps their first ambassadorial visit, or stranded together somewhere, or solving a mystery, or using the rings, or a Silver Chair-like camping quest, or sharing an apartment, etc… Anything where they’re awesome best friends with complementary strengths. (I also love exquisitely ambiguous, the-only-reason-I’m-sure-it's-romantic-is-because-there's-a-pairing-tag-in-the-header, co-dependent yet effective Edmund/Susan, so feel free to do this duo instead.)
4. Crossovers (any het crossover pairing is welcome): a) Lost (but please not with a Jack or Ben focus); or b) Game of Thrones (I have not read the books, so please don't spoil me; my favorite protagonists/storylines are Tyrion/Sansa-Bronn-Varys-Tyrells & Co in Kings Landing, Jamie/Brienne, Sam, Bran & Co)
Author: vialethe
Recipient: aurilly
Rating: G
Possible Spoilers/Warnings: Implied Susan/Edmund
Summary: He can't hold onto her any more in England than he ever could in Narnia, no matter how he tries; still, they've never given up on each other yet.
I Know it in My Memory
He keeps stumbling in on his sister in the bath.
It isn't the worst part of living with her on their own, not by far (she never takes a turn at doing the washing up, for one), but still, this is the second time it's happened, and it's developing the potential to become embarrassing.
“I might begin to think you're doing this on purpose, Ed,” Susan says, looking up at him from the white froth of her bath, steam rising like a veil around her.
She has her hair up, but bits of it have escaped, sticking to her neck with damp, and for a moment he can almost hear the crashing of waves, can nearly smell salt in the air. He wants to say to her, do you remember, but those are not words he says to Susan; those are not words anyone says to Susan, not these days.
Instead he turns away, and watches her face framed in the mirror, blurred by a mist of condensation. “Don't flatter yourself.”
For a moment, he thinks she won't respond, this sister he can no longer make out clearly; but then she puts out her tongue and flicks her toes, splashing him like a child.
“You used to be such a proper lady,” he says with mock disapproval, reaching for her towel.
“Never with you,” she says. “With everyone else, but not you, Ed.” It sounds like hope, but when he turns to look, her eyes are closed, her lashes a fragile barrier she knows he wouldn't ever break, not for all the magic in Narnia.
***
“Oh no, not you, Ed!” Susan says, upon seeing his approach to the harbor below Cair Paravel. “I'm quite certain Peter was meant to join me.”
“He was,” Edmund answers, staring up at the bright hull of Narnia's newest ship, the galleon Splendour Hyaline. “Unfortunately, his grace the High King has been called away to deal with a border dispute between the Giants in the north, so you're stuck with me instead. I hope it isn't too much of a disappointment.”
“It isn't that,” she says, and puts her hand on his arm, as if to say, and you know it. She has always been that way, taking everything to heart, unable to let things bounce off her, like Lucy, or deflect them like Peter. He can never decide whether he loves this trait of hers or hates it.
“It's just that you get so seasick,” she continues, making him rethink that assessment. “I don't wish to spend the entire voyage mopping your brow and murmuring soothing platitudes.”
“I was only seasick that once, and I was eleven years old at the time!” He doesn't look, but he can feel the quiver in her fingers as she fights back laughter. “And in any case, they've assured me the seas should be perfectly calm this time of year between Narnia and the Lone Islands. There will be absolutely no brow-mopping required, thank you very much.”
“I shall hold you to that,” she says, and smiles up at him, looking as pure and sweet as the clear blue waters at their feet. “And,” she adds over her shoulder, as she turns to board the ship, “you will, of course, tell me the true reason you're here in place of Peter.”
Sometimes he wonders how much of the bond between them is based on this, on the talent they have for discovering secrets, for drawing out information. Sometimes he simply wonders exactly when they began to use it on each other.
*
The deck is crowded with all manner of Narnians; Fauns, Dwarves, Minotaurs (surprisingly good sailors, and tireless rowers besides), a few Wolves (Susan's honor guard), a human or two, an entire flock of Seabirds, and one large black Bear no one could quite remember having invited along.
Susan pours wine over the bow, letting it run down to the sea, asking the blessing of sea and sky for the ship's first voyage, before taking in the chaos on deck and making a tactical retreat to her cabin.
“I hope that wasn't an inferior vintage, sister dear,” Edmund says, following her without invitation. “I don't mean to end up drowned because we fed sour wine to the sea.” Truthfully, the deck is rolling only a little, and his stomach is steady; still, it never hurt to consider every aspect.
“No more sour than you, Ed,” she says, and he reaches out, tugging at her plaits in retaliation.
She protests and squirms and attacks all his most ticklish spots in return, but he doesn't stop until her pins are scattered and her hair tumbles thick and free around her face.
“There,” he says, grinning. “Now you look fit for the sea.”
She laughs, breathless, and her hair slips through his fingers like smoke.
*
A week out and the decks have been cleared, the stores stowed away, and a regular, routine sense of peace has settled over the ship.
He finds Susan at sunset, sitting at the stern, watching the sun sink into the sea. She has let herself slowly come unbound as they sail to the East; her dress is simple, her feet bare, hair lifting behind her in the breeze.
“I love this ship,” she says when he sits down beside her, stroking the wood of the deck with her fingertips as though it were a cat. “There are so many possibilities in a ship; one never knows what might happen when you set sail.”
“Yes,” he says. “You might end up becalmed, or attacked by pirates, or any number of horrible things.” He's learned to love the sea, really, to love the taste of salt on his lips, the swell of the waves, the creaking sounds of the ship breathing and flexing around them, but there's something to be said for keeping up appearances.
“Don't be such a brat,” she says, jostling his shoulder. He might have known better than to think he could still fool her. Lucy might have believed him for a moment, or Peter, both of them too truthful and open to see falsehood, however innocent, in others. But not Susan; she is too much like him, the blind spots in his reflection. “Think of all the places we might go,” she says, and he tries, wanting to match her, to make her smile.
“We might sail out to the city of the Merfolk,” he says, “and see if the waters truly are as clear as they say.”
“We might sail up the coast, and put in at every port, and collect all of our friends until we make a party at sea.”
Privately, Edmund thinks being trapped at sea on an increasingly full ship sounds like the opposite of an enjoyable time, but he knows better than to say so. “I might take you to the ends of the world, or Calormen, or Telmar, all the places we've never been.”
She is silent for a moment, and the wind shifts, blowing her hair between them like a curtain, hiding her face.
“You might take me to my wedding in this ship.” Her voice has changed, all the natural cheer and warmth of a moment ago vanished into something false and brittle; to others, maybe, she would sound the same, but his ears are more finely tuned.
“I might save you from a wedding in this ship,” he responds, trying to maintain the levity in his own voice, trying to keep the peace whole as long as she will.
He is certain he sounds as false as she.
The wind blows her hair again over her face, and she makes a frustrated sound, pushing it back, twisting it between her hands. “We can't go on as we are forever, Ed.”
“I don't see why not,” he says. The curve of her neck is exposed; he imagines he can see her heartbeat fluttering just under her skin, a nervous rhythm in concert with his own. “There are four thrones in Cair Paravel. I don't think we're meant to leave.”
“So we're just meant to stay there forever, to never change, to remain alone? I don't think that's what Aslan would want.”
Edmund has long since given up on guessing what Aslan would want, if he had ever begun. That is his faith; to trust in his own judgment, to trust that inspiration and enlightenment will come when needed.
Susan's faith has always been apart from his, something closely held and fiercely protected. She's fairly glowing with it now, bathed golden by the last rays of the sun, beautiful and willful and proud.
“No,” he says. Their hands nearly brush, set so close together on the deck; a tiny knot in the wood lays between their fingers, a flaw no bigger than a hummingbird's egg. “I don't think we're meant to be alone at all.”
“Oh, Ed-” she sighs, as the sun slips below the horizon at last, and he decides that he doesn't wish to hear what she has to say, not now - at some point in the future, perhaps, but not now, not with the memory of the gold light around them and that sense of peace still hanging in the air.
“What's all this talk of weddings, anyhow?” he interrupts. “Did the Duke of Galma ask you to marry him again?”
She flashes him a look, but he's finding the waves quite fascinating, keeping his eyes fixed on their swell.
“Yes,” she says, and the natural cheer is back in her voice, probably in spite of herself. “The poor dear, he must be eighty if he's a day, but it never does stop him from trying his luck. I'm not certain if he hopes I'll change my mind or if he simply forgets he's already asked.”
“He has hope,” Edmund says, leaning back to watch the first stars appear overhead, remembering how she'd looked at the feast on Galma, with white gems shining in her hair. “No one could ever forget asking such a thing of you.”
***
When she finally emerges from the bath (having been kicked out long ago, Edmund has taken up a strategic position in his favorite overstuffed leather chair, which he'd liberated from their father's study upon moving), her hair is impeccably styled into perfect waves, not a strand out of place.
It's too rigid, he thinks, and too harsh, like the bright red that marks her mouth, like the shiny black of her long-coveted brand new shoes, clicking their way across the hall.
“Going out then?” he asks, as she pauses by the door to put on her coat.
“Yes,” she says, and doesn't look his way, not for an instant.
“Anyone I know?” he says, cycling through in his mind all the things he currently hates; his age, the slenderness of his frame (which stubbornly refuses his efforts to fill it out), the lack of a sword at his hip, every single male in the city not named Pevensie.
“No.” All of her attention is on the buttons of her coat, as though they've grown more difficult to fasten, or fingers he's seen pick a hundred locks have turned clumsy.
Her fingers are on the latch before she finally meets his eyes. “And for heaven's sake, Edmund, don't wait up for me.”
She's gone before he can speak, leaving only a gust of cold air and the scent of her perfume behind.
By rights it should be cloying, he thinks. The scent of it should be heavy, to match her painted lips and her carefully set hair, her dresses that fit just so.
But it isn't; it's light and slightly spicy, like citrus trees in bloom. He doesn't know how she manages it here, but she smells, as she always has, of Narnia in summer.
That, at least, hasn't changed, and he breathes it in long after it's faded from the air around him.
***
Disaster finally strikes some three weeks out, as they're nearing the Lone Islands.
It is Susan's idea, when land first comes into view, to picnic on Felimath. “Even my legs are growing weary of being at sea,” she says, stretching up on her toes, clinging to the bow rail as the waves surge against the prow. “I can't imagine how you've tolerated it.”
“With the help of copious amounts of honey mead,” Edmund says, sliding up next to her, letting the motion of the waves shift them together and apart. “I've been thoroughly drunk every hour since we left Redhaven, haven't you noticed?”
“Strange that I should still have found a bottle to take with us on our picnic, then,” she says, her eyes sparkling with the sort of mischief usually reserved for escapades with Lucy and the Dryads (escapades he and Peter are forbidden from so much as asking about, as it happens). “You do hold your liquor well,” she continues, studying him, eyes narrowed thoughtfully in the sunlight, “but not well enough to fool me. I know perfectly well it was that dreadful Bear who drank all the mead the governor gave us, you needn't think to protect him.”
“I suppose his snoring was somewhat difficult to miss.” The Bear (who went by the name of Bolger) had, in fact, spent two days afterward sleeping in the hold, with sticky fur and a bottle still clutched between his paws.
Somehow it is Bolger who ends up weighing down the rowboat with them (looking sleepy still, but fiercely guarding the picnic basket), as Edmund and Susan take up the oars.
“I've always enjoyed Felimath,” she says, as the soft green shores come into view. “It's so peaceful there.”
“Of course it's peaceful,” Edmund says, between pulls of the oar. “There's nothing there but sheep - and a shepherd who pops over once in a while to count them.” The Splendour Hyaline, much too large to come in close to the harbor-less island, dwindles slowly, turning to head into Doorn, where they would meet up with her once more.
They have just reached the halfway point between land and ship when the gale blows up out of the east, swift and sudden, slamming into the sea like a curse conjured up from the depths.
That wine must have been sour after all, is all Edmund has time to think, before the boat rocks and flips, and Bolger's roar blends with the roar of the sea in his ears, and the only solid thing in his world is Susan's hand, clinging to his arm, keeping them afloat.
*
“I used to love songs and tales of adventure,” Susan says, what seems like a hundred water-logged years later, as Edmund coughs up what he's certain must be a third gallon of seawater from his burning lungs. “They aren't quite so wonderful when you're in the midst of them, though.”
“Almost drowning,” Edmund says, between coughs, “hardly counts as an adventure. I do hope poor old Bolger made it ashore all right.”
There's no sign of the Bear anywhere nearby; indeed, there's no sign of anything on the shore where they washed up but themselves, and the splintered bits of wood he assumes had once been their boat.
Susan, sitting beside him, seems to have fared much better than himself; she's soaked to the skin, of course, but she at least is upright and alert, scanning the sea through the veil of rain. He watches as she pushes her hair back, a few strands stubbornly clinging to the skin of her throat, watches the curve of her mouth, a coral colored spot in an otherwise grey and bloodless world.
“Anyhow,” he says, coughing still, tasting the sea crossing his lips again, “I thought you liked all the romantic ballads and such. It's Lucy who loves the adventures.”
The set of her mouth seems firmer now, that prim look she used to get so long ago when someone had misremembered a lesson they ought to have learned well. “No,” she says, shading her eyes with her hand. “Lucy loved the beautiful damsels and the brave knights. I loved the Horses who ran to freedom, or the Mermaid who grew legs for love of the land.” He doesn't know how he could have tangled his sisters together so in his mind; just because these days it is Lucy who likes to take a turn in the training yards, and Susan who is more inclined to be still and observe.
“Whatever is that?” she says, watching something small and dark tumble along in the path of the waves. Too tired to protest, Edmund simply watches as she darts out into the lessening rain, and returns in weary triumph with her prize.
“Our basket has survived!” she proclaims, and it does look to be fairly intact, if liberally festooned with seaweed. Inside, they find the bread and meats quite spoiled, but there are pears and oranges, and, best of all-
“By Aslan's Mane! The honey mead came through,” Edmund says, pulling out the bottle, perfectly intact.
The rain slackens further as they eat, until soon enough it stops altogether, the storm sinking back into the waves as quickly as it had risen.
“We ought to wait here, I think,” Susan says. “I believe I can see Doorn not far off to the left there, and the ship will surely come about to search for us before long.”
“It's not quite the picnic you had in mind, I'll wager,” he says, lying on his back, munching on a pear. “But still, not half bad. Granted, I'll not be engaging you to plan further outings after what's happened, but-”
“Oh, do be quiet, Ed,” she says, turning to him with a smile that manages to be both fond and exasperated, all blended together. When he open his mouth to speak again, she pops a piece of orange between his lips, her fingers brushing along the stubble shadowing his chin.
He tastes the citrus on his tongue, sweet and tart both, and grins.
*
Some hours later, the moon has begun its rise overhead, the bottle of honey mead sits mostly empty between them, and their attempts to build a fire have resulted in at least three squabbles, a great deal of smoke, and finally, a rather fitful flame.
“It's pretty, fire,” Susan says, somewhat unsteadily, from where she's tucked herself up against him, her head against his shoulder. “Just like the hair of that one granddaughter of the Duke's. Whatever was her name?”
Edmund stiffens, and drinks once more, feeling the liquor slide down his throat, a pleasant burn that takes some of the edge from the danger he's sensing. “I haven't the least idea,” he says. “Why should I?”
“She flirted shamelessly with you the entire time we were in port. You ought to have been kinder to her, she would make you a good wife.” Without looking, she snatches the bottle from his hand, and he lets it go without pursuit or comment, knowing he only has the energy for one fight at the moment.
“I don't want a wife. I'm perfectly happy as I am, thank you.”
“But if you married, there would be someone to take my place in Cair Paravel,” she says, still in that same dreamy, half-lost voice, and he wants badly to bring her back, to take her by the shoulders and force her to meet his eyes. He doesn't dare though, not quite, not even with the mead doing its work on him. Still, she must feel something of it, some shift in him, for she continues on hurriedly, “Or if Peter did, or Lucy. Why, if all four of us married and stayed in Narnia, there would be no room for us all!”
It is too much; far too much, and yet he can't say so, can't admit it out loud. “It isn't that easy to replace a piece of yourself,” is the best he can do, as he pushes away from her and reclaims the bottle, noting with disgust the tiny amount remaining, not nearly enough to get him as drunk as he suddenly wants to be. The cool of the night air seeps in between them, the heat of their small fire nothing in comparison to the shared warmth of their skin, and he pushes his free hand down into the sand, waiting for it to warm around him, to serve as a false, shifting blanket. “If you leave, it can't ever be the same, not for any of us.”
Susan doesn't speak in return, just buries her fingers in the sand next to his, the world shifting and sliding under his hand as she carves it out to suit herself.
We belong together, he wants to say. Instead, he says, “You belong with us,” looking not at her but at the waves, the white froth barely visible in the moonlight, racing up the shore towards them, but always receding, always running away.
“It isn't good to be so possessive,” Susan murmurs, and he can feel her fingers against his now, grains of sand catching and rubbing between them like inconvenient truths. “To love too fiercely, to want too much. We can't keep everything the same by pretending everything can go on as when we were children. It's our responsibility.”
Sand goes flying, like the pieces of what might pass for his numbed feelings, as he yanks his hand away from hers and stands, bottle still in hand. “Responsibility,” he says, quite carefully, “can go hang.”
She calls something after him as he stalks away, but he lets it pass over him, lets the sound of the sea drown her out, following a bend in the coastline until she is lost from sight when he turns back, and the world is open, and empty, and his.
It is sometime later, after he has finished off the bottle at last and left it stuck in the sands, that he becomes aware of the singing.
At first, even as he rises to follow it without quite understanding why, he thinks it is only Susan; but his sister, as sweet as her voice may be, never sounded anything like this.
Enchanting does not begin to describe it, he thinks, heading over the sands, feeling his feet sink and stumble as he goes. It is like a tapestry of sound, a world stitched together out of harmony and melody, someone singing him the very song of the world in a language he does not understand, but longs to know.
They are there when he reaches the shore, as he stumbles into the frigid waves of the ocean; three women, sitting on rocks just offshore, bare but for their hair, blowing around them in the breeze. One of them, he notes, has hair like ice, another like fire. The third has hair like smoke and mischief in her eyes, and it's she who reaches out her hand to him and opens her lips, a summon in song.
Somewhere in the back of his brain, a forgotten practical bit of him is yelling, Sirens, you fool! Back away, stop up your ears, do something!, but before him there is only the song, and temptation given voice and form.
The water is surging about his knees when an arm like an iron bar circles around his chest, and her voice speaks next to his ear, sounding harsh as the call of a crow.
“You leave him be!” Susan yells, trying to thrust him behind her, behind the bright flare of the torch she holds in her other hand. “You cannot have him!” Still, Edmund struggles forward, caught between the pull of the sea and the strength of her hold. On their rocks, the Sirens cock their heads in unison, and sing out a challenge that, though not phrased in any human language, is a clear question anyhow.
“Because,” Susan says, “he is mine.”
It is then that Edmund's trance snaps (as the Siren with ice in her hair laughs and sneers, and he shudders with memory), and he backs away through the waves, stumbling backward towards the shore with Susan at his back, his heart hammering under her hand as the Sirens surge up once more, and open their mouths (how could he have not seen those fangs, he wonders, or the blood on their lips) to deliver a command he knows they will be helpless against, even the two of them together.
They never hear it, though; instead there is a thumping behind them, the ground shaking beneath their feet, and a mighty roar fills his ears, a sound full of fury and not a bit of musicality at all.
Even Sirens, it seems, are taken aback by the sudden rush of a soggy, seven-foot tall Bear in full charge; they vanish beneath the waves before Bolger's paws so much as touch the water, and he turns back, looming over his sovereigns.
“Don't suppose you've got any of that honey stuff left?” the Bear asks, snuffling about Edmund's head in a most undignified manner, and there's nothing for it but to admit the mead is, in fact, gone. Luckily, Bolger is a steady sort of fellow, and settles down with a modicum of grumbling, letting Edmund and Susan curl up against him for the night.
“I'm sorry, Su,” he whispers to her, above the sound of snoring Bear. “I've been an awful fool.”
“Don't be,” she says through a yawn, tucked up against him once more, letting him feel safe and complete. “You didn't have a choice.” She reaches up blindly, and manages to pat him on the head; he catches her hand on its way down and brings her fingers to his lips.
Even over the scents of sea and sand and damp fur, they still smell of oranges.
***
It isn't that he's waited up on purpose; it's just that his book was so engrossing, and then there was the washing up to be done (of course), and such an intriguing programme on the radio that time kept creeping by, minute by endless minute, and finding him still awake.
He's smoking a cigarette in the shadows beside the doorway, telling himself that surely it must be warmer up against the wall, when he finally hears the sound he's been waiting for, the staccato tapping of Susan's heels on the pavement.
But their rhythm is off, too hurried, stuttering, sounding almost nervous. Susan's steps are never anything less than confident, no matter her world, no matter her situation; he frowns, and stubs out his cigarette, waiting in the shadows for her to turn the corner.
When she finally does, he sees there's a man beside her, his hand on her arm, and Edmund tightens his fist around his forgotten lighter so hard the edges dig into his skin.
He's about to step out and make himself known when she stops, several houses up the street. “This is quite far enough, thank you,” she says, and he recognizes the tone of her voice from endless diplomatic sessions, sweet politeness coating the steel underneath. “It's getting late, and I shouldn't like to keep you.”
The man says something in return, his voice too low for Edmund to make out, but he can hear the familiar tones of his sister's voice when she responds, “I've already told you, no.” There's only steel left now, and he grins to himself in the shadows.
Her companion responds with laughter, and leans in to say something in her ear that causes Susan to jerk back, turning towards the house before she's spun back by a hand on her arm, her gasp bit off, barely audible at this distance.
Edmund is hardly aware of leaving the shadows, of propelling himself away from the wall and onto the pavement before them; he knows she can defend herself, this gentle sister of his, but here she has no weapons but herself; no bow, no daggers, no titles or courtesies. There is only Susan, alone with all the confidence of a queen.
He reaches for her free hand, and there's no relief in her eyes - only a flash of something he can't name - but he hadn't expected it in any case. “Come on, Su.”
“Edmund, please,” she says. “Go back inside.” She's pale in the light of the streetlamps, leeched of color, stripped down to shades of grey, only the red of her mouth standing out like a wound.
“Who's this then?” the man asks, and Edmund still hasn't spared a glance for him, taking a careful survey of his sister's face and finding her still intact, still perfectly drawn.
“My brother,” Susan says, “but really, Ed-”
“Isn't that sweet,” her date says, smiling in a way that isn't sweet in the least. “Your baby brother's come out to defend your honor, love.”
Peter always said that time seemed slower in a fight, that everything ran at half the speed it should, but he's never agreed; for Edmund, time has always sped up into a horrible, sickening blur of movement, of his fist closing around the hard metal still in his hand, of the sweet sound of a cracking uppercut, of blood on his knuckles and Susan's voice hissing in his ear, “Enough, Ed!”
(Later, he will say it was the 'baby brother' that spurred him to it. They will both know it isn't so.)
His adrenaline doesn't slow until she's pulled him back into the flat, and he comes back to himself as she peers out the gap in the curtains, watching her date pick himself up off the pavement and stumble away.
“Well, that was very nicely done,” she says, turning to him, nothing of the controlled queen left in her voice at all. “I'd expect Peter to act like such a fool, but you! I can take care of myself, Edmund, I don't need you!”
He isn't certain what she sees in his face, the face that had once mirrored her own (“You should grow a beard,” she had said to him a lifetime ago, fingers tracing the smooth skin at his jaw), but she must feel something crumple and twist inside her the same as he does, because her lip trembles as he's not seen it do for years now.
He reaches for her, but she sinks before they connect, sitting abruptly on the floor, and he kneels beside her, hesitant until she takes his hand and rests her head on his shoulder.
“Why do I always choose so badly?” she says, her voice soft as her hair against his face, soft as the scent of Narnia still clinging stubbornly to her, as stubbornly as he wishes he could.
“You don't,” he murmurs into her crown, and, “you don't,” as he kisses her cheek and tastes salt on his lips, repeating it over and over, though they both know it's a lie, just as they both know the reasons.
“You never choose at all,” she says, so quietly he thinks perhaps it's only in his head.
“It's never been a choice for me,” he says; she says nothing, but her fingers grip his all the harder.
***
On their voyage home (which is mercifully uneventful), they stop once more at Galma, and this time it is Edmund who receives an offer of marriage, of a bride with fire in her hair and laughter in her wide green eyes.
He leaves her with courteous words and disappointment on the shores of her grandfather's island, and they sail for home with no more passengers than when they had began.
“Why did you choose to say no?” Susan asks, joining him at the rail, looking back to the vanishing shores of possibility.
“You know why,” he says, turning from the rail to look east, to Narnia and beyond.
*
“You will always fall in love with things you can't hold on to,” he says to her, in the dim light of her cabin, the night before they are due to make port once more in Narnia, “and then you will run before they can leave you.”
“That is a horrible prediction, Ed!” she says, sputtering with laughter, before she smacks him upside the head with a pillow.
“You told me I would end up in thrall to my dreams, until I was unsure what was reality!” he protests. “It seemed only fair.”
“Perhaps we shouldn't play this game; we aren't much good at it,” she says over the rim of her wineglass, her eyes huge and dark as she watches him, still with a smile on her lips.
“I'm sure we could think of something else,” he offers, and does not meet her gaze.
(Someday he will be a ghost to her, and she will choose him still. They will break each other, time and again, trying to hold on; he knows this in his bones.)
*
“I give in,” she says, as Cair Paravel grows ever larger in their sight, and the crew bustles around them, making preparations to dock. “You've kept your secret uncommonly well this time, brother.”
“Which secret would that be?” he asks, turning to her, noting with a pang that her hair is once more bound into its coronet, not a strand left to blow on the wind.
“Why it was you who came, and not Peter,” she answers. “You've exchanged no diplomatic correspondence, made no deals in private, negotiated nothing. Why come then, when you had no love of the sea and business to conduct at home?”
He considers teasing her, asking just how she would know for certain that none of her speculated dealings had taken place, but in the end, it isn't worth it; she would know it for a lie, as she always knows everything about him, even the things she refuses to admit aloud.
Just then, the wind gusts, warm as the breath of a lion, making the sails snap and dance, pulling a curl free from Susan's intricate style to drift around her face.
“I chose to come,” he says, brushing the errant curl back, his mouth against the shell of her ear, “because you would be here.”
When they land, Peter proclaims Susan more radiant than he has ever seen her, and says the voyage has done her good.
Susan smiles, and thanks him, and holds tight to Edmund's hand.
***
He is lying on the rug the next day, contemplating the map on their ceiling made of cracks and patches and spots when she appears besides him. Her feet are still damp from the bath, and she leaves a trail of steamy wet footprints on the floor behind her, the shape of her imprinted and left behind to dry up and fade away.
He doesn't bother turning his head until she sets something down beside it with a thump and settles herself beside him, nudging him to shove over and make room for her.
“It turns out our neighbors are Polish,” she says, as he eyes up the bottle between their heads, thick glass filled with a dark amber liquid, shining gold in the slanting afternoon sunlight. “I didn't ask where they'd managed to acquire it, but there you have it.”
“More to the point,” he asks, “how did you acquire it?”
Susan shrugs, and struggles with the cork, all her attention for the mead. “It turns out the wife wears the same size shoe as I do.”
“You didn't have to,” he says quietly, taking the bottle from her and popping the cork with ease. He knows what those shiny black shoes had meant to her, how long she had eyed them in the shop window, how she had scrimped and saved to buy them, how she had sighed to him when she first put them on, “They make me feel like a queen, Ed.”
“I owed you a debt,” she says, still lightly, still avoiding his eyes. “It seemed like the right choice.”
He hands her the bottle, and she finally meets his eyes as their fingers meet over the neck, holds his gaze as she tips it back and swallows. Her hair is loose, falling to her shoulders in its natural waves, her simple blue robe one he remembers well from Finchley, with her feet bare beneath it. If there were only a salt breeze, he thinks, everything would be perfect; but then, things never happen the same way twice.
“How many times did you save me? Consider it even,” he says, and takes an overzealous drink himself, a drop of mead running down his fuzzy, unshaven chin.
Susan laughs, and swipes it from the corner of his mouth with her thumb, pressing her skin to his lips for the briefest of moments.
He accepts it - all of it, the honey mead, her appearance, all and everything - as a mute apology, an admittance of secret memory, of knowledge, that she trusts him to uncover, as he always has.
There is golden light in her hair, and she tastes of sea salt and oranges.
What I want: I like stories that include: friendship, adventures, banter, daring stratagems, painting/sculpture/art, in vino veritas, fish out of water, the Wood Between the Worlds, and/or at least one chuckle. I prefer casual romance that develops out of friendship over angsty epic one true love; I like gen friendship stories just as much as romance. I love Edmund and Tirian the most, but everyone else, too.
Prompt words/objects/quotes/whatever:
1. Last Battle AU-ish. Instead of it being only a vision, Tirian is actually transported to the Friends of Narnia dinner and spends time in England. I ship Tirian/Jill, Eustace/Jill or Tirian/Susan, but ensemble gen would be just as wonderful.
2. Edmund & Tumnus as close friends through the years, in a way that isn’t dependent on Lucy and Tumnus's dynamic.
3. Lucy & Edmund on an adventure, without their siblings. Perhaps their first ambassadorial visit, or stranded together somewhere, or solving a mystery, or using the rings, or a Silver Chair-like camping quest, or sharing an apartment, etc… Anything where they’re awesome best friends with complementary strengths. (I also love exquisitely ambiguous, the-only-reason-I’m-sure-it's-romantic-is-because-there's-a-pairing-tag-in-the-header, co-dependent yet effective Edmund/Susan, so feel free to do this duo instead.)
4. Crossovers (any het crossover pairing is welcome): a) Lost (but please not with a Jack or Ben focus); or b) Game of Thrones (I have not read the books, so please don't spoil me; my favorite protagonists/storylines are Tyrion/Sansa-Bronn-Varys-Tyrells & Co in Kings Landing, Jamie/Brienne, Sam, Bran & Co)