(no subject)
TITLE: beneath the winter snow (or so I have been told)
AUTHOR: eudaimon
WORDCOUNT: 1883
PAIRINGS/CHARACTERS: Jadis, Susan & Edmund, and I think there's a touch of Susan/Edmund, but only if you squint.
RATING: light R
WARNINGS: a touch of incest, maybe, depending on your reading, and definitely an allusion or two to quite dark themes.
SUMMARY: Sometimes, he wonders if it’s always going to show on his face or in his eyes; the things he did, the way he was, the time he froze in place..
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, guys. Not even a little bit.
A/N: This is for thaursir and marycontraire. The title is from Winter Song by Sara Bareille.
They say that things just cannot grow
Beneath the winter snow,
Or so i have been told.
Is love alive?
Sometimes, he wonders if it’s always going to show on his face or in his eyes; the things he did, the way he was, the time he froze in place. Coming back from Narnia the second time, his bones still remember adult height. In corridors he suddenly finds himself breathless, shrugs his blazer and pulls the knot in his tie loose. There’s a window open and he feels the chill breeze and he leans against the stone wall that feels slightly damp in the time between breakfast and first lesson. It gets under the open collar of his shirt and makes him shiver.
A smell of hoar frost. Winter is coming.
A thing: at night he tries to remember the feel of warmer skin. He closes his eyes, keeps them closed (because, otherwise, he’s awake and that’s somehow worse) and he remembers being a little boy and lying with his head on his mother’s lap and tracing her knee-cap with the little tips of little fingers. He remembers the warmth of Lucy’s hand on his face versus the ice in his belly that day on the battlefield. He remembers Susan gathering him in close and the brush of her blouse against his cheek.
Warming things. Things which flare up and out.
Sometimes it helps. Sometimes, nothing does. He writes Susan letters, writes things like its cold here, Su. Might even snow soon and he hopes that she catches the double meaning and can read the longing there, read warm me today and warm me again tomorrow and remind me that I am loved and tell me it’s alright to stay this time.
In the middle of the night he opens his eyes and it’s white-out. Dead cold. Standing over him, she towers, big as he always imagined God to be before he met Aslan and filled that place forever in his heart. She bends from the waist and he can’t help but notice the spill of her hair and the sway of her tits, milk-white. Everything about her is so bleak and cold and there are places in him, places that froze solid when he was too young to know any better, and they yearn for the cold places in her.
These parts of him never learned.
In these dreams, he’s naked in the snow but his skin is always feverishly hot. The only cold he ever feels is when she touches him, when she presses him back and kneels astride him. Then, the scar on his belly throbs with cold.
“Grown so big, Edmund Pevensie,” she says, and she touches him between his legs with those long fingers and with the other hand she takes hold of his chin, her sharp nails opening bloody half moons. He can never look away when his hips lift, when he pushes through her fingers. Sixteen year old boys are treacherous creatures when their bodies go on without them. He closes his eyes and tries to picture his sister’s face; blue eyes, dark hair (like his own), the cold putting a flush into her face. He imagines Su reaching out to touch him with both hands and somehow it becomes her that he’s kissing. Better or worse he doesn’t know but at least there’s heat there. Susan is safe and warm. Fire gives life as well as takes it.
He wakes up sticky and tear-stained, his lips chapped and tasting of powdered sugar. He mops up guiltily with the edge of his sheet and pads to the window, careful not to wake anybody up. He leans his forehead against the cold glass and closes his eyes so that he can’t see it.
Snow snow snow snow snow.
*
For the dance the chaps wear black tie and the girls wear tulle. When he sees her in white, his heart nearly stops. He puts his sister at one end of a scale and Jadis at the other and then there’s this girl, this new girl, with silver pins in her hair light brown hair. In the hall, she tucks her arm through his, pulls him closer and leans against him while they’re dancing and he feels the heat of her tight, high breasts against his chest through his shirt. She leans up on her toes and whispers thankyou for asking me, Edmund but all that he can feel is heat and then, later, in the snow, she pulls him close again and kisses him and his heart stops again. There’s snow melting in her eyelashes and her mouth is so, so cold but her tongue is hot and then she touches his face with her hands still warm from being shoved into his pockets and he remembers how to be sixteen again.
*
Another thing: what if she ruined him forever for warmer girls?
*
Years later, he pauses on Bond street to look at a watch in a shop window. He’s nineteen now, which means this is the ninth winter since that long cold in Narnia. He’s never liked the cold, bundles himself up in pea-coat and a long red scarf, wrapped twice around his neck and still halfway to his knees. He keeps his hands shoved in his pocket. In the window, all that he can see reflected is his eyes and the reddened tip of his nose between hair and red wool.
“Grown so tall, son of Adam.”
He starts and there she is, too tall to be believed, in white overcoat and a hat that looks soft pulled down over her red hair. For a moment, he thinks that he’s mistaken, and then he realizes that nobody else ever had eyes like hers.
“No,” he says, and shakes his head. Not here. Not this year.
It’s barely even snowed.
Icy fingers under his scarf, stirring the hair that’s too long and curling at the nape of his neck. Her body presses against his back and his hips cant forward, and he’s hard under his coat and he hates her. He trembles. He was a King once in Narnia, and he hunted in dark forests and he spoke with men and animals, saw fire and the machineries of war. Once a King of Narnia, but her hands snake around his waist and cup him between his legs and all that he can think is that it’s not fair if he’s ruined. Yes, he did those things. Yes, it was him, and he was hers once, and he hasn’t never stopped suffering for it. He has no gifts because he left him them, and, his whole life, he’s been looking for ways to come in out of the cold and stay.
“Not yours,” he says, choking the words out between chattering teeth.
He leans his head against the window and closes his eyes until she’s gone.
The taste of confectionary sugar on his tongue.
He walks for a long time before he can bring himself to duck into an Underground station. He rides the rattling train leaned into a corner, and a little girl in a blue bobble hat leans against his leg for a couple of stops before her mother tugs her gently away. He twitches one hand to wave goodbye.
For a long time, at school, he wore the key to Susan’s flat around his neck, to remind him that he had somewhere to go to if he needed to. The antidote to loneliness is knowing that you have somewhere to go to if you need to.
When.
Beside the front door, there are roses growing in a pot in summer but now there’s only bare, woody branches. The key is in his pocket, on the ring with the ones from home and the one that unlocks a bike lock that he lost years ago, though he’s still got the bike.
He lets himself in without knocking
There are nylons drying on a rack in front of the fire, magazines on the dining table. He takes off his shoes at the door and pads through the flat in his sock feet, finds Su in the kitchen, her hair pinned up hap-hazard, singing to herself as she makes a pot of tea. There’s already two cups on the sideboard. He wraps his arms around her from behind and leans his chin on her shoulder.
“Thanks, Su,” he says, quietly.
She squeezes his wrist.
In the end, she drags his coat down off his shoulders, unwinds his scarf and hangs them up next to the door. It’s warm in the flat but he sits on the sofa cupping his tea in his hands, the warmth leaching into his palms. She stands beside him, ruffles his hair and he rests his head against her hip.
“What?” she asks him, but he shakes his head, because he doesn’t have the words to talk to her about things lost and learned and everything they ever left behind. Instead he puts down his tea cup and covers his face with his hands. Su sits down beside him, and it’s always sort of been this: Peter and Lucy, Edmund and Susan. She gets herself comfortable and he leans in against her, his cheek against the soft swell of her breast. They sort of half lie there, and the coals in the grate spit and flare. They shift until they’re lying together on the settee, his head on Susan’s chest, her knee bent so that her thigh cradles him. He half closes his eyes so that all he can see is the shifting, dancing glow of the coals. She strokes his hair and kisses his forehead. He turns his face, grazes his lips against soft skin and his hand pushes up under the hem of her blouse to rest against her where she’s warmest, right over her ribs.
“When you think about Narnia, what do you think about?” he asks her, and she tells him that she doesn’t really think about it very much at all any more, the same way as she doesn’t really think about her childhood bedroom, or how ghastly the war was. He rubs his thumb against her skin and realizes that he doesn’t have the language to talk to her about this.
There’s a cold corner in his heart which will always do for keeping his cold secrets safe.
“Why don’t you close your eyes for a bit, Ed?” she asks him, and he tries to nod and shake his head at the same time, his lips and the tip of his nose brushing against her bare skin. His hand slips lower, coming to rest against her knee, tracing the cap with the pad of his thumb like he used to do with their mother when he was a child, just a very little boy.
He curls his toes, utterly warm, and Susan kisses his forehead again and, for a moment, he can’t even remember any other girls, not the one who at the dance or the one in the snow, and both of them wore white.
Desperately, he doesn’t want to be ruined. Desperately, he wants to believe that a boy can grow and a traitor can mend and that lovers are forgivers too and that dreams do not do permanent harm.
Edmund Pevensie, grown big and tall, turns his face and presses a kiss to the smooth heat of the skin over his biggest sister’s beating heart.
AUTHOR: eudaimon
WORDCOUNT: 1883
PAIRINGS/CHARACTERS: Jadis, Susan & Edmund, and I think there's a touch of Susan/Edmund, but only if you squint.
RATING: light R
WARNINGS: a touch of incest, maybe, depending on your reading, and definitely an allusion or two to quite dark themes.
SUMMARY: Sometimes, he wonders if it’s always going to show on his face or in his eyes; the things he did, the way he was, the time he froze in place..
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, guys. Not even a little bit.
A/N: This is for thaursir and marycontraire. The title is from Winter Song by Sara Bareille.
They say that things just cannot grow
Beneath the winter snow,
Or so i have been told.
Is love alive?
Sometimes, he wonders if it’s always going to show on his face or in his eyes; the things he did, the way he was, the time he froze in place. Coming back from Narnia the second time, his bones still remember adult height. In corridors he suddenly finds himself breathless, shrugs his blazer and pulls the knot in his tie loose. There’s a window open and he feels the chill breeze and he leans against the stone wall that feels slightly damp in the time between breakfast and first lesson. It gets under the open collar of his shirt and makes him shiver.
A smell of hoar frost. Winter is coming.
A thing: at night he tries to remember the feel of warmer skin. He closes his eyes, keeps them closed (because, otherwise, he’s awake and that’s somehow worse) and he remembers being a little boy and lying with his head on his mother’s lap and tracing her knee-cap with the little tips of little fingers. He remembers the warmth of Lucy’s hand on his face versus the ice in his belly that day on the battlefield. He remembers Susan gathering him in close and the brush of her blouse against his cheek.
Warming things. Things which flare up and out.
Sometimes it helps. Sometimes, nothing does. He writes Susan letters, writes things like its cold here, Su. Might even snow soon and he hopes that she catches the double meaning and can read the longing there, read warm me today and warm me again tomorrow and remind me that I am loved and tell me it’s alright to stay this time.
In the middle of the night he opens his eyes and it’s white-out. Dead cold. Standing over him, she towers, big as he always imagined God to be before he met Aslan and filled that place forever in his heart. She bends from the waist and he can’t help but notice the spill of her hair and the sway of her tits, milk-white. Everything about her is so bleak and cold and there are places in him, places that froze solid when he was too young to know any better, and they yearn for the cold places in her.
These parts of him never learned.
In these dreams, he’s naked in the snow but his skin is always feverishly hot. The only cold he ever feels is when she touches him, when she presses him back and kneels astride him. Then, the scar on his belly throbs with cold.
“Grown so big, Edmund Pevensie,” she says, and she touches him between his legs with those long fingers and with the other hand she takes hold of his chin, her sharp nails opening bloody half moons. He can never look away when his hips lift, when he pushes through her fingers. Sixteen year old boys are treacherous creatures when their bodies go on without them. He closes his eyes and tries to picture his sister’s face; blue eyes, dark hair (like his own), the cold putting a flush into her face. He imagines Su reaching out to touch him with both hands and somehow it becomes her that he’s kissing. Better or worse he doesn’t know but at least there’s heat there. Susan is safe and warm. Fire gives life as well as takes it.
He wakes up sticky and tear-stained, his lips chapped and tasting of powdered sugar. He mops up guiltily with the edge of his sheet and pads to the window, careful not to wake anybody up. He leans his forehead against the cold glass and closes his eyes so that he can’t see it.
Snow snow snow snow snow.
*
For the dance the chaps wear black tie and the girls wear tulle. When he sees her in white, his heart nearly stops. He puts his sister at one end of a scale and Jadis at the other and then there’s this girl, this new girl, with silver pins in her hair light brown hair. In the hall, she tucks her arm through his, pulls him closer and leans against him while they’re dancing and he feels the heat of her tight, high breasts against his chest through his shirt. She leans up on her toes and whispers thankyou for asking me, Edmund but all that he can feel is heat and then, later, in the snow, she pulls him close again and kisses him and his heart stops again. There’s snow melting in her eyelashes and her mouth is so, so cold but her tongue is hot and then she touches his face with her hands still warm from being shoved into his pockets and he remembers how to be sixteen again.
*
Another thing: what if she ruined him forever for warmer girls?
*
Years later, he pauses on Bond street to look at a watch in a shop window. He’s nineteen now, which means this is the ninth winter since that long cold in Narnia. He’s never liked the cold, bundles himself up in pea-coat and a long red scarf, wrapped twice around his neck and still halfway to his knees. He keeps his hands shoved in his pocket. In the window, all that he can see reflected is his eyes and the reddened tip of his nose between hair and red wool.
“Grown so tall, son of Adam.”
He starts and there she is, too tall to be believed, in white overcoat and a hat that looks soft pulled down over her red hair. For a moment, he thinks that he’s mistaken, and then he realizes that nobody else ever had eyes like hers.
“No,” he says, and shakes his head. Not here. Not this year.
It’s barely even snowed.
Icy fingers under his scarf, stirring the hair that’s too long and curling at the nape of his neck. Her body presses against his back and his hips cant forward, and he’s hard under his coat and he hates her. He trembles. He was a King once in Narnia, and he hunted in dark forests and he spoke with men and animals, saw fire and the machineries of war. Once a King of Narnia, but her hands snake around his waist and cup him between his legs and all that he can think is that it’s not fair if he’s ruined. Yes, he did those things. Yes, it was him, and he was hers once, and he hasn’t never stopped suffering for it. He has no gifts because he left him them, and, his whole life, he’s been looking for ways to come in out of the cold and stay.
“Not yours,” he says, choking the words out between chattering teeth.
He leans his head against the window and closes his eyes until she’s gone.
The taste of confectionary sugar on his tongue.
He walks for a long time before he can bring himself to duck into an Underground station. He rides the rattling train leaned into a corner, and a little girl in a blue bobble hat leans against his leg for a couple of stops before her mother tugs her gently away. He twitches one hand to wave goodbye.
For a long time, at school, he wore the key to Susan’s flat around his neck, to remind him that he had somewhere to go to if he needed to. The antidote to loneliness is knowing that you have somewhere to go to if you need to.
When.
Beside the front door, there are roses growing in a pot in summer but now there’s only bare, woody branches. The key is in his pocket, on the ring with the ones from home and the one that unlocks a bike lock that he lost years ago, though he’s still got the bike.
He lets himself in without knocking
There are nylons drying on a rack in front of the fire, magazines on the dining table. He takes off his shoes at the door and pads through the flat in his sock feet, finds Su in the kitchen, her hair pinned up hap-hazard, singing to herself as she makes a pot of tea. There’s already two cups on the sideboard. He wraps his arms around her from behind and leans his chin on her shoulder.
“Thanks, Su,” he says, quietly.
She squeezes his wrist.
In the end, she drags his coat down off his shoulders, unwinds his scarf and hangs them up next to the door. It’s warm in the flat but he sits on the sofa cupping his tea in his hands, the warmth leaching into his palms. She stands beside him, ruffles his hair and he rests his head against her hip.
“What?” she asks him, but he shakes his head, because he doesn’t have the words to talk to her about things lost and learned and everything they ever left behind. Instead he puts down his tea cup and covers his face with his hands. Su sits down beside him, and it’s always sort of been this: Peter and Lucy, Edmund and Susan. She gets herself comfortable and he leans in against her, his cheek against the soft swell of her breast. They sort of half lie there, and the coals in the grate spit and flare. They shift until they’re lying together on the settee, his head on Susan’s chest, her knee bent so that her thigh cradles him. He half closes his eyes so that all he can see is the shifting, dancing glow of the coals. She strokes his hair and kisses his forehead. He turns his face, grazes his lips against soft skin and his hand pushes up under the hem of her blouse to rest against her where she’s warmest, right over her ribs.
“When you think about Narnia, what do you think about?” he asks her, and she tells him that she doesn’t really think about it very much at all any more, the same way as she doesn’t really think about her childhood bedroom, or how ghastly the war was. He rubs his thumb against her skin and realizes that he doesn’t have the language to talk to her about this.
There’s a cold corner in his heart which will always do for keeping his cold secrets safe.
“Why don’t you close your eyes for a bit, Ed?” she asks him, and he tries to nod and shake his head at the same time, his lips and the tip of his nose brushing against her bare skin. His hand slips lower, coming to rest against her knee, tracing the cap with the pad of his thumb like he used to do with their mother when he was a child, just a very little boy.
He curls his toes, utterly warm, and Susan kisses his forehead again and, for a moment, he can’t even remember any other girls, not the one who at the dance or the one in the snow, and both of them wore white.
Desperately, he doesn’t want to be ruined. Desperately, he wants to believe that a boy can grow and a traitor can mend and that lovers are forgivers too and that dreams do not do permanent harm.
Edmund Pevensie, grown big and tall, turns his face and presses a kiss to the smooth heat of the skin over his biggest sister’s beating heart.