Romeo || Edmund Pevensie

After All

It felt like drowning, only in reverse this time.

     The water had started to fall in his lungs, and everything felt like it was ending. The oxygen was pressed from his chest, and it felt like he was being crushed from the inside out. But there was a peacefulness to it that could not be explained. A serene silence that could stop a heart; the bliss in the ignorance of water was unparalleled.

     Without being able to breathe, Edmund was forced to swim. He flailed his limbs in the attempt to reach the surface, and for a short while, it felt it was to no avail. Usually, he was a fairly strong swimmer, but this was a completely different situation. Breathing was supposed to be easy, and simple: this was anything but.

The ceiling of the spare bedroom Lucy had been sleeping in during their Cambridge stay. It was the small tell they needed to prove they were back home. Edmund spluttered as the water left his lungs, and as he looked around, he found there was none surrounding them at all. He and Lucy were sat on the bed as if they'd never left, Eustace with his legs crossed on the floor.

     They didn't say anything, not at first, because they couldn't. It was hard to comprehend all that had happened before, and how they were never able to return. This was home now, no matter what changed. Whether the war lasted for a hundred years or six days, this was home, and Narnia was unattainable.

It was a distant memory now, and they would have to live with that. It was their choice to leave, because staying would mean their family would never know what happened to them. That wasn't the sort of thing Edmund could do. He loved his family just as much as he loved Aramis, and that made the decision all the much more harder. But he had made it; there was no way around it.

He'd looked to his sister, then to his cousin, and then to the godawful room they were in. Whilst it wasn't the luxury that being a High King gave him, it was better than most. Edmund knew that things were going to be hard now, and that time was creeping up, but he could do it. He could survive, just about.

"Eustace!" Aunt Alberta called from down the bottom of the stairs. Her voice was as prim as it was before, again, just as if they'd never left. Edmund could have laughed. "Eustace, what are you doing up there? Jill Pole's dropped in for a visit!"

When they looked to Eustace, he was grinning, though no one else was. He would be able to go back one day. He was lucky. He would be able to look fondly at the painting whenever he wanted, a know that it was somewhere in between where everyone fit in; even little weirdos like him.

He placed the frame back on the wall, and as Edmund sat on the bed, he sighed. This was something brand new. A world he finally had to explore. This was Edmund's chance to make something of himself. He only had to figure out what it was going to be.

Whilst Cambridge was still their permanent home for so long, they had to become more accustomed to their life there. Eustace's closest friend, Jill, came around the house more often than Uncle Harold left the house. Whenever the doorbell rang, or the clacker knocked, they had just started to ignore it. Hardly anyone knew that they lived there anyway, and there was no way Edmund would be sharing anything with anyone from school.

That was, until the day things changed.

Winter had finally come again, and the air was crisp and cold. It came in waves, sometimes snow, and sometimes rain. Whatever it was, Edmund adored it. The snow always reminded him of Narnia, even if it was his worst memory of there. It reminded him of Aramis, with his flawless skin glowing in the freezing light of the winter.