Fic: Not Calling to Eternity
Title: Not Calling to Eternity
Author: bedlamsbard
Recipient: elenielofnarnia
Rating: PG
Spoilers/Warnings: no warnings, references to The Silver Chair but no direct spoilers.
Summary: Morning on the twelfth day brings with it a slight lessening of fever, somewhat less of the urge to vomit every seven minutes, and Eustace Scrubb bearing with him a packet of books and a faintly put-upon expression. Jill and Eustace, England, post-SC.
Author’s Notes: Title from Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Abend” (“Evening”), Stephen Mitchell translation. Thanks to snacky and aella_irene, champion beta readers!
Morning on the twelfth day brings with it a slight lessening of fever, somewhat less of the urge to vomit every seven minutes, a letter in the post from Aunt Hermione in Devon, and Eustace Scrubb, bearing with him a packet of books and a faintly put-upon expression, although it’s really just a variation on his usual annoyed expression, which Jill has noticed gives him a slightly pinched look.
She pushes herself up on one elbow and frowns at him, uncomfortably aware that with the windows closed (there’s rain beating down on the glass, and Eustace’s hair and shirt are wet) the room smells unpleasantly like vomit. “What are you doing here?” she demands, wondering a little just how suspicious she sounds; she hasn’t been able to make out the tone in anyone’s voice, including her own, for almost a week now, which has been both relieving, alarming, relaxing, and somewhat disconcerting.
Eustace looks indignant, as if his arrival is something that shouldn’t be mistaken or missed. “You didn’t know I was coming?” he says. “I did ring, and I talked to your mum; I thought she told you.”
Jill picks at the embroidery on her quilt. “No,” she says after a moment, looking up. She moves her head too quickly and the motion beats restlessly behind her eyes, making her flinch, which makes it worse. She’s vaguely aware of several quick footsteps in her general direction before she warns, “I’m going to be sick again,” and promptly is, in the basin that’s taken up residence by her bedside.
“Eurch,” Eustace says, fastidiously, and hands her the glass of water from her bedside table when Jill reaches for it blindly.
She rinses her mouth out, spits, and takes the smallest sip possible before setting the glass aside. “Sorry,” she apologizes, flapping a nervous hand at the room. “Actually ill. It’s been miserable; worst way to spend a holiday in history. You can’t possibly think it’s preferable to - whatever you were doing.”
Jill has some vague idea that he’d been with his cousins in the city; she knows his parents have gone to some kind of showing or lecture series or something of the sort elsewhere, but can’t remember for certain whether Eustace had said whether or not he was going with them. She thinks that he’d said they didn’t think him suited for it anymore.
She’s proven correct a moment later when Eustace says, “Peter’s back from Cranwell, so every five minutes he’s having some kind of terrific row with Susan, who goes tearing off into the worst parts of London and then Peter either sulks or goes tearing off after her, and I haven’t figured out which one is preferable yet. Edmund’s studying for his school certificate, so he never pokes his head out of his room except to yell at Peter - or Lucy, sometimes, who’s either vanished completely or banging about in the kitchen doing something alarming with the foodstuffs, unless Susan comes back and throws her out. Once she threw a bottle of wine at Peter’s head. There’s always someone screaming at someone else; it’s absolutely wretched. My aunt and uncle are off doing something for the war effort - somewhere not London,” he adds as an afterthought.
“So?” Jill prompts when he doesn’t go on.
“So I rang your mum and told her that you said I could use your library for that project of Rickman’s and she let me come.”
Jill is just starting to get worried - she doesn’t remember Professor Rickman assigning a project of any sort over the holidays, though it’s hardly out of the question - when Eustace sees the expression on her face and adds, “Which doesn’t actually exist; I just wanted to get out of Finchley. I used my pocket money to get a rail ticket.”
“Oh.”
“And if they weren’t screaming at each other, Peter was trying to teach me Narnian runic or how to throw knives or some sort of fighting that seems to sum up to ‘kick them in the balls and then hit them over the head with a heavy object before running away’,” Eustace adds, wincing. “I was going mad. You’re not contagious, are you?”
“Not anymore,” Jill says, and Eustace sighs and pulls up her desk chair to the other side of the bed, opposite of the bin.
“How are you?” he asks, more as an afterthought than anything else.
Jill raises an eyebrow. “I may fall asleep,” she warns.
Eustace shrugs and holds up a book from his packet. “I just wanted to get away from the Pevensies,” he says, and opens the book to a place somewhere near the middle, tucking the train ticket he had been using as a bookmark between the last page and the back cover.
Jill lays back down, trying to decide whether or not she wants the sheets up to her chin before she finally decides that no, she doesn’t; it’s too hot. She turns her head on the pillow to watch Eustace, and if she half-shuts her eyes and concentrates on the sound of the rain outside her window, she can nearly fancy that they’re back on the moors above Narnia, Puddleglum somewhere just beyond sight, Eustace poking at the smoldering, sputtering fire with the tip of his sword and trying to keep the soup at something resembling a boil. Those first few nights Jill had spent more awake than asleep, jumping at every sound in case it was a giant come to bash their heads in or an oversized bat or owl that had decided they’d make a good meal after all, but after that, she’d been too tired to worry, too tired to do anything except swallow whatever food Puddleglum produced out of sticks and stones and the store at the bottom of his pack before climbing into her bedroll and falling asleep. And if she slants her eyes the other way, they might not be on the moors at all, but in their comfortable rooms at Harfang, warm, well-fed, and innocent yet of what the giants had had in mind, just glad to be somewhere that wasn’t out in the wild as the seasons raced head-on towards winter. Neither image should be particularly comforting, but Jill holds them before her eyes and pokes and prods at them anyway, trying to decide what she thinks of them.
After a moment’s contemplation, she decides that the only reason they seem like anything other than the miserable mess they were is because of her fever; normally, she knows, she doesn’t think of that experience at all except in a distant kind of way, as if there’s been a veil drawn between that horrible few months looking for Rilian in the muck and her real life in England. It’s not that she doesn’t remember, because she does all too well, even though Jill thinks she’d rather forget the whole mess entirely. It’s more like - looking through mist, or cotton. Like it’s all a story she’s read in a favorite book, so many times she knows it by heart, but not something that’s actually happened to her.
Or at least - part of it is like that. She remembers the mountain and the lion - Aslan - as clear and sharp as cut crystal, and it still sneaks up on her sometimes, when she’s sitting in class or in the bath or at the dinner table; in the split second between one forkful of potatoes and the next, Jill is back on the edge of that cliff or on the verge of the creek, with Aslan’s huge eyes staring her down. She doesn’t have any control over it; she never knows when it’s going to strike her.
Maybe it’s the fever, but just now Jill can remember the moor - or at least, this moment on the moor - more clearly than she’s ever been able to before. Most of the time it’s a relief that she doesn’t remember, but for some reason it bothers her now, and she makes herself recreate the scene in her mind, piece by painstaking piece: the rock that had been digging into her hip, the coarse weave of the blanket she clutched with cold-numbed fingers, the bland aftertaste of Puddleglum’s soup in her mouth, the shred of dried meat stuck between her back teeth, the sputter of the flames as Eustace tried to coax them to stay alive under the cold drizzle that misted over everything, so that when she woke in the morning she’d be soaked through to the skin. It’s a wonder none of them had gotten pneumonia.
Somewhere in the midst of her re-creation, Jill falls asleep.
She dreams of Puddleglum, sitting by the fire as she and Eustace huddled together for warmth, too miserable to think of what they were doing as odd or embarrassing. It had been the day they’d seen the stone on the moors that had marked some famous, forgotten battle fought thousands of years ago, in the days when Eustace said (somewhat disdainfully, and with an air that suggested he hadn’t quite believed it) his cousins the Pevensies had ruled over Narnia as kings and queens, and Puddleglum had been so impressed by seeing it. That night hadn’t been any different than any other night, except in that Puddleglum had started to sing some epic poem about Narnia’s Golden Age and Eustace had asked him not to, since he didn’t want to be reminded of his cousins. He’d chanted a ballad instead, of a faun who’d been sent away from Narnia by Aslan on a quest and who’d wandered the world for twenty years, his deep baritone rising and falling and lulling Jill to sleep.
“Oh, I am bound away from Narnia
Bound away from the land I love.
For twenty long years I'm bound to wander
My only guide the stars above.
I'll travel far 'cross rock and stone
Through mountains high and rivers wide
But I shall never see my Narnia
Or rest my feet at my own hearthside.”
There’s a thought Jill has, circling around the dream but unable to make clear sense until she wakes abruptly, blinking her eyes in the surprising dark of the room: at some point in time, it’s turned from day into night.
She puts the back of her hand against her forehead, and maybe she’s losing her mind, but she thinks she doesn’t feel as hot as she has this past week. Turning her head, she sees Eustace asleep in the chair beside her, the book fallen from his hands facedown to the side of the bed.
Jill licks dry lips, considers reaching for the water glass on her bedside table, and decides against it. “Scrubb,” she croaks instead. “Scrubb.”
He jerks awake, flailing wildly for a moment before he remembers where he is and gets control of himself. “What? Are you all right? Pole?”
“Narnia,” she says, and sees him blink. “Do you think it exists? I mean, really exists, like England exists?”
He looks at her suspiciously. “What do you mean?”
Jill sketches a pattern in the air, though of what she doesn’t know. “I mean - do you really think it exists, like England exists? Or does it just -- pop into being when he wants it to, so we can go there and do what he wants?”
Eustace squints. “Well -“ he says. “There was Caspian. Obviously something happened between when I was on the Dawn Treader and when we were there. I mean - Prince Rilian. And Caspian grew old.”
His face falls, and Jill tries, like she has so many times before, to picture what it might be like, to know someone for a little while, and then to leave and come back to find that the world has changed and they’ve grown old. And she can’t do it - though she thinks she should be able to - because it doesn’t seem anything like something that might happen in England. In the real world.
“But you didn’t speak to him,” she says to Eustace. “I mean - we saw him in - in that place, you know - but you didn’t speak to him in Narnia, and when you saw him in that place he was the man you’d known you’d known before. So maybe he - Narnia - doesn’t exist when we aren’t there. Maybe it just - pops into existence when he wants it too, and that’s why it seems like so much time has passed. Because no time has passed; he’s just…made something new.”
Eustace looks at her dubiously.
Jill moves her hands again, weakly, but she can tell that he’s not entirely convinced. But he doesn’t disagree with her, either.
Instead, he says dubiously, “How high is your fever, Pole?”
Jill sulks. “A hundred and one this morning. I don’t know what it is now. But I’m serious.”
Eustace makes a sudden distressed motion with one hand. “I don’t know, Pole. I never thought about it.” He shrugs a little. “I don’t think the Pevensies would agree, but they’re…different.”
Jill puts her head back against the pillow. “I just had an odd dream - a memory, I think.” She closes her eyes briefly, trying to conjure up the threads of it, but they flee before her like mist before the wind. “I don’t remember it now.”
“That’s too bad,” Eustace says, his expression shrewd, and Jill blushes for no reason she can think.
She kneads the blanket idly between her fingers. “Do you know any Narnian songs?” she says suddenly, surprising herself.
Eustace is evidently surprised enough by the question that he blurts out, “Yes, yes, I do,” which isn’t normally the sort of thing he’d admit, if Jill knows him at all. He hastens to add, “Edmund and Lucy taught them to Caspian and Reepicheep and everyone else on the Dawn Treader. And there were some Telmarine songs. But mostly sailor’s songs.”
She has a particularly silly cousin who reminds her a little of Eustace’s stories of Susan Pevensie, only slightly less angry, and Jill conjures up Geraldine’s memory now and bats her eyelashes at Eustace. “Can you sing me one?” she asked.
Eustace looks taken aback, but after a moment he clears his throat and begins to sing in a surprisingly clear tenor. Jill’s too tone-deaf at the moment to be able to tell if he’s got any sense of a tune, but she can make out the words easily.
”Oh, Caspian, I love your daughter
The fairest maid I’ve ever seen
And she, my lord, is now my captor
My only love and my dear queen.
But I am called away from Telmar
Back onto the ocean’s waves
And I will watch upon a star
For the land shall be my grave.”
Eustace’s voice is steady and familiar and Jill closes her eyes and loses herself in the sound of it, listening to him sing of a Telmarine sailor (when Telmarine Narnia had still been a sea-going nation, apparently, she thinks, making herself dredge up the memories of Narnian history that Puddleglum had imparted to them) who’d loved a princess promised to another man.
”And now I touch her face again
One last time before the end
For this is but the fate of men
To break the things we cannot mend.
My love is gone, my world entire
I press a kiss to her cool lips
And prepare to burn in hellfire
Cursing forever all kingships.”
He trails off, blushing, and Jill reaches out and finds his hand with hers, curling her fingers around his.
Original prompt:
What I want: Eustace/Jill set in England during their early teen years (almost sixteen), slightly fluffy, one of them falls ill.
Prompt words/objects/quotes/whatever: "Happy for the other's company." Soup.
What I definitely don't want in my fic: Anything too graphic. It should be kind of like a fluffy oneshot (but chapters are nice if they're possible), so no need for extensive swearing or anything sexual happening.
Author: bedlamsbard
Recipient: elenielofnarnia
Rating: PG
Spoilers/Warnings: no warnings, references to The Silver Chair but no direct spoilers.
Summary: Morning on the twelfth day brings with it a slight lessening of fever, somewhat less of the urge to vomit every seven minutes, and Eustace Scrubb bearing with him a packet of books and a faintly put-upon expression. Jill and Eustace, England, post-SC.
Author’s Notes: Title from Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Abend” (“Evening”), Stephen Mitchell translation. Thanks to snacky and aella_irene, champion beta readers!
Morning on the twelfth day brings with it a slight lessening of fever, somewhat less of the urge to vomit every seven minutes, a letter in the post from Aunt Hermione in Devon, and Eustace Scrubb, bearing with him a packet of books and a faintly put-upon expression, although it’s really just a variation on his usual annoyed expression, which Jill has noticed gives him a slightly pinched look.
She pushes herself up on one elbow and frowns at him, uncomfortably aware that with the windows closed (there’s rain beating down on the glass, and Eustace’s hair and shirt are wet) the room smells unpleasantly like vomit. “What are you doing here?” she demands, wondering a little just how suspicious she sounds; she hasn’t been able to make out the tone in anyone’s voice, including her own, for almost a week now, which has been both relieving, alarming, relaxing, and somewhat disconcerting.
Eustace looks indignant, as if his arrival is something that shouldn’t be mistaken or missed. “You didn’t know I was coming?” he says. “I did ring, and I talked to your mum; I thought she told you.”
Jill picks at the embroidery on her quilt. “No,” she says after a moment, looking up. She moves her head too quickly and the motion beats restlessly behind her eyes, making her flinch, which makes it worse. She’s vaguely aware of several quick footsteps in her general direction before she warns, “I’m going to be sick again,” and promptly is, in the basin that’s taken up residence by her bedside.
“Eurch,” Eustace says, fastidiously, and hands her the glass of water from her bedside table when Jill reaches for it blindly.
She rinses her mouth out, spits, and takes the smallest sip possible before setting the glass aside. “Sorry,” she apologizes, flapping a nervous hand at the room. “Actually ill. It’s been miserable; worst way to spend a holiday in history. You can’t possibly think it’s preferable to - whatever you were doing.”
Jill has some vague idea that he’d been with his cousins in the city; she knows his parents have gone to some kind of showing or lecture series or something of the sort elsewhere, but can’t remember for certain whether Eustace had said whether or not he was going with them. She thinks that he’d said they didn’t think him suited for it anymore.
She’s proven correct a moment later when Eustace says, “Peter’s back from Cranwell, so every five minutes he’s having some kind of terrific row with Susan, who goes tearing off into the worst parts of London and then Peter either sulks or goes tearing off after her, and I haven’t figured out which one is preferable yet. Edmund’s studying for his school certificate, so he never pokes his head out of his room except to yell at Peter - or Lucy, sometimes, who’s either vanished completely or banging about in the kitchen doing something alarming with the foodstuffs, unless Susan comes back and throws her out. Once she threw a bottle of wine at Peter’s head. There’s always someone screaming at someone else; it’s absolutely wretched. My aunt and uncle are off doing something for the war effort - somewhere not London,” he adds as an afterthought.
“So?” Jill prompts when he doesn’t go on.
“So I rang your mum and told her that you said I could use your library for that project of Rickman’s and she let me come.”
Jill is just starting to get worried - she doesn’t remember Professor Rickman assigning a project of any sort over the holidays, though it’s hardly out of the question - when Eustace sees the expression on her face and adds, “Which doesn’t actually exist; I just wanted to get out of Finchley. I used my pocket money to get a rail ticket.”
“Oh.”
“And if they weren’t screaming at each other, Peter was trying to teach me Narnian runic or how to throw knives or some sort of fighting that seems to sum up to ‘kick them in the balls and then hit them over the head with a heavy object before running away’,” Eustace adds, wincing. “I was going mad. You’re not contagious, are you?”
“Not anymore,” Jill says, and Eustace sighs and pulls up her desk chair to the other side of the bed, opposite of the bin.
“How are you?” he asks, more as an afterthought than anything else.
Jill raises an eyebrow. “I may fall asleep,” she warns.
Eustace shrugs and holds up a book from his packet. “I just wanted to get away from the Pevensies,” he says, and opens the book to a place somewhere near the middle, tucking the train ticket he had been using as a bookmark between the last page and the back cover.
Jill lays back down, trying to decide whether or not she wants the sheets up to her chin before she finally decides that no, she doesn’t; it’s too hot. She turns her head on the pillow to watch Eustace, and if she half-shuts her eyes and concentrates on the sound of the rain outside her window, she can nearly fancy that they’re back on the moors above Narnia, Puddleglum somewhere just beyond sight, Eustace poking at the smoldering, sputtering fire with the tip of his sword and trying to keep the soup at something resembling a boil. Those first few nights Jill had spent more awake than asleep, jumping at every sound in case it was a giant come to bash their heads in or an oversized bat or owl that had decided they’d make a good meal after all, but after that, she’d been too tired to worry, too tired to do anything except swallow whatever food Puddleglum produced out of sticks and stones and the store at the bottom of his pack before climbing into her bedroll and falling asleep. And if she slants her eyes the other way, they might not be on the moors at all, but in their comfortable rooms at Harfang, warm, well-fed, and innocent yet of what the giants had had in mind, just glad to be somewhere that wasn’t out in the wild as the seasons raced head-on towards winter. Neither image should be particularly comforting, but Jill holds them before her eyes and pokes and prods at them anyway, trying to decide what she thinks of them.
After a moment’s contemplation, she decides that the only reason they seem like anything other than the miserable mess they were is because of her fever; normally, she knows, she doesn’t think of that experience at all except in a distant kind of way, as if there’s been a veil drawn between that horrible few months looking for Rilian in the muck and her real life in England. It’s not that she doesn’t remember, because she does all too well, even though Jill thinks she’d rather forget the whole mess entirely. It’s more like - looking through mist, or cotton. Like it’s all a story she’s read in a favorite book, so many times she knows it by heart, but not something that’s actually happened to her.
Or at least - part of it is like that. She remembers the mountain and the lion - Aslan - as clear and sharp as cut crystal, and it still sneaks up on her sometimes, when she’s sitting in class or in the bath or at the dinner table; in the split second between one forkful of potatoes and the next, Jill is back on the edge of that cliff or on the verge of the creek, with Aslan’s huge eyes staring her down. She doesn’t have any control over it; she never knows when it’s going to strike her.
Maybe it’s the fever, but just now Jill can remember the moor - or at least, this moment on the moor - more clearly than she’s ever been able to before. Most of the time it’s a relief that she doesn’t remember, but for some reason it bothers her now, and she makes herself recreate the scene in her mind, piece by painstaking piece: the rock that had been digging into her hip, the coarse weave of the blanket she clutched with cold-numbed fingers, the bland aftertaste of Puddleglum’s soup in her mouth, the shred of dried meat stuck between her back teeth, the sputter of the flames as Eustace tried to coax them to stay alive under the cold drizzle that misted over everything, so that when she woke in the morning she’d be soaked through to the skin. It’s a wonder none of them had gotten pneumonia.
Somewhere in the midst of her re-creation, Jill falls asleep.
She dreams of Puddleglum, sitting by the fire as she and Eustace huddled together for warmth, too miserable to think of what they were doing as odd or embarrassing. It had been the day they’d seen the stone on the moors that had marked some famous, forgotten battle fought thousands of years ago, in the days when Eustace said (somewhat disdainfully, and with an air that suggested he hadn’t quite believed it) his cousins the Pevensies had ruled over Narnia as kings and queens, and Puddleglum had been so impressed by seeing it. That night hadn’t been any different than any other night, except in that Puddleglum had started to sing some epic poem about Narnia’s Golden Age and Eustace had asked him not to, since he didn’t want to be reminded of his cousins. He’d chanted a ballad instead, of a faun who’d been sent away from Narnia by Aslan on a quest and who’d wandered the world for twenty years, his deep baritone rising and falling and lulling Jill to sleep.
“Oh, I am bound away from Narnia
Bound away from the land I love.
For twenty long years I'm bound to wander
My only guide the stars above.
I'll travel far 'cross rock and stone
Through mountains high and rivers wide
But I shall never see my Narnia
Or rest my feet at my own hearthside.”
There’s a thought Jill has, circling around the dream but unable to make clear sense until she wakes abruptly, blinking her eyes in the surprising dark of the room: at some point in time, it’s turned from day into night.
She puts the back of her hand against her forehead, and maybe she’s losing her mind, but she thinks she doesn’t feel as hot as she has this past week. Turning her head, she sees Eustace asleep in the chair beside her, the book fallen from his hands facedown to the side of the bed.
Jill licks dry lips, considers reaching for the water glass on her bedside table, and decides against it. “Scrubb,” she croaks instead. “Scrubb.”
He jerks awake, flailing wildly for a moment before he remembers where he is and gets control of himself. “What? Are you all right? Pole?”
“Narnia,” she says, and sees him blink. “Do you think it exists? I mean, really exists, like England exists?”
He looks at her suspiciously. “What do you mean?”
Jill sketches a pattern in the air, though of what she doesn’t know. “I mean - do you really think it exists, like England exists? Or does it just -- pop into being when he wants it to, so we can go there and do what he wants?”
Eustace squints. “Well -“ he says. “There was Caspian. Obviously something happened between when I was on the Dawn Treader and when we were there. I mean - Prince Rilian. And Caspian grew old.”
His face falls, and Jill tries, like she has so many times before, to picture what it might be like, to know someone for a little while, and then to leave and come back to find that the world has changed and they’ve grown old. And she can’t do it - though she thinks she should be able to - because it doesn’t seem anything like something that might happen in England. In the real world.
“But you didn’t speak to him,” she says to Eustace. “I mean - we saw him in - in that place, you know - but you didn’t speak to him in Narnia, and when you saw him in that place he was the man you’d known you’d known before. So maybe he - Narnia - doesn’t exist when we aren’t there. Maybe it just - pops into existence when he wants it too, and that’s why it seems like so much time has passed. Because no time has passed; he’s just…made something new.”
Eustace looks at her dubiously.
Jill moves her hands again, weakly, but she can tell that he’s not entirely convinced. But he doesn’t disagree with her, either.
Instead, he says dubiously, “How high is your fever, Pole?”
Jill sulks. “A hundred and one this morning. I don’t know what it is now. But I’m serious.”
Eustace makes a sudden distressed motion with one hand. “I don’t know, Pole. I never thought about it.” He shrugs a little. “I don’t think the Pevensies would agree, but they’re…different.”
Jill puts her head back against the pillow. “I just had an odd dream - a memory, I think.” She closes her eyes briefly, trying to conjure up the threads of it, but they flee before her like mist before the wind. “I don’t remember it now.”
“That’s too bad,” Eustace says, his expression shrewd, and Jill blushes for no reason she can think.
She kneads the blanket idly between her fingers. “Do you know any Narnian songs?” she says suddenly, surprising herself.
Eustace is evidently surprised enough by the question that he blurts out, “Yes, yes, I do,” which isn’t normally the sort of thing he’d admit, if Jill knows him at all. He hastens to add, “Edmund and Lucy taught them to Caspian and Reepicheep and everyone else on the Dawn Treader. And there were some Telmarine songs. But mostly sailor’s songs.”
She has a particularly silly cousin who reminds her a little of Eustace’s stories of Susan Pevensie, only slightly less angry, and Jill conjures up Geraldine’s memory now and bats her eyelashes at Eustace. “Can you sing me one?” she asked.
Eustace looks taken aback, but after a moment he clears his throat and begins to sing in a surprisingly clear tenor. Jill’s too tone-deaf at the moment to be able to tell if he’s got any sense of a tune, but she can make out the words easily.
”Oh, Caspian, I love your daughter
The fairest maid I’ve ever seen
And she, my lord, is now my captor
My only love and my dear queen.
But I am called away from Telmar
Back onto the ocean’s waves
And I will watch upon a star
For the land shall be my grave.”
Eustace’s voice is steady and familiar and Jill closes her eyes and loses herself in the sound of it, listening to him sing of a Telmarine sailor (when Telmarine Narnia had still been a sea-going nation, apparently, she thinks, making herself dredge up the memories of Narnian history that Puddleglum had imparted to them) who’d loved a princess promised to another man.
”And now I touch her face again
One last time before the end
For this is but the fate of men
To break the things we cannot mend.
My love is gone, my world entire
I press a kiss to her cool lips
And prepare to burn in hellfire
Cursing forever all kingships.”
He trails off, blushing, and Jill reaches out and finds his hand with hers, curling her fingers around his.
Original prompt:
What I want: Eustace/Jill set in England during their early teen years (almost sixteen), slightly fluffy, one of them falls ill.
Prompt words/objects/quotes/whatever: "Happy for the other's company." Soup.
What I definitely don't want in my fic: Anything too graphic. It should be kind of like a fluffy oneshot (but chapters are nice if they're possible), so no need for extensive swearing or anything sexual happening.