WARNING: Massive angsty, emotional mess to follow. You may want to have a tissue box at hand. Please also be aware that I deal with some very sensitive issues in this chapter, so be advised—this may be difficult for some people to read.

Disclaimer: I own nothing in this marvelous universe; it all belongs to C.S. Lewis and Walden Media.

Author's Note: Well, as promised…:grins: Welcome to the first chapter of Learning to Walk Blindfolded, the companion piece to my Keeping the Faith fic. This story will chronicle Peter and Susan's journey, as they struggle to reach their siblings and Prince Caspian…and learn to trust in what they cannot see in the meantime. Both chapters I have been putting up will be lightly revised, but are still pretty much the same chapters you might remember. I hope you enjoy!

Rating: T/M (for sensitive issues)

Summary: While their younger siblings cross the gorge, Peter and Susan have their own journey to make, and their own lessons to learn…(AU, Book and Moviebased, Companion Piece to Keeping the Faith)

"Speech"

/Personal Thoughts/

Memories/Excerpts/Quotes (Italics)

(1) Prince Caspian pg. 261 in The Complete Chronicles of Narnia (Hardcover; Illustrated)

Learning to Walk Blindfolded

By Sentimental Star

Chapter One: The Reclaiming of Sight

"I can't see anything," said Peter after he had stared his eyes sore. "Can you, Susan?"

"No, of course I can't," snapped Susan. "Because there isn't anything to see. She's been dreaming. Do lie down and go to sleep, Lucy."

"And I do hope," said Lucy in a tremulous voice, "that you will all come with me. Because—because I'll have to go with him whether anyone else does or not."

"Don't talk nonsense, Lucy," said Susan. "Of course you can't go off on your own. Don't let her, Peter. She's being downright naughty."

"I'll go with her, if she must go," said Edmund. "She's been right before."

"I know she has," said Peter. "And she may have been right this morning. We certainly had no luck going down the gorge. Still—at this hour of the night. And why should Aslan be invisible to us? He never used to be. It's not like him…" (1)

"Why wouldn't I have seen him?"

"Maybe you just weren't looking for him."

It was hardest for Peter: he was the oldest. That meant many things.

In his mind, it meant that he should have seen Aslan, just as Lucy had. It meant that, if he had not seen the Lion, then surely…surely it must have been a trick of the light, or that Lucy had been dazzled by the sunlight and heat.

"The last time I didn't believe Lucy, I ended up looking…well, pretty stupid."

It meant that while Edmund may have had a point, he knew what he had seen, and no possible (or passable) path down into the gorge existed.

It meant that while he had led them wrong once, he would not do so again.

"I'm sorry, Lu, I know you may be right after all, but I can't help it."

It also meant that he failed to notice when his two youngest siblings did not join them as he led their small party away from the gorge and back down towards the fir wood—an oversight that would later horrify him.

At the moment, he was much too preoccupied by the sudden obstacle the fir wood presented them.

The trees were too thick.

Whether they had entered the gorge through a thinner part of the wood, or he had gotten them somehow turned around, it was much harder going back than going forward.

An hour of stooping and pushing, shoving and swatting, and they had made barely a half-mile's headway. It was then that Peter realized if they had any hope of making it to Beruna, they would need to circumvent the wood, and follow along the lower half of the gorge.

He gave a soft groan as he understood that they would need to double back, and had probably gone a half-mile out of their way when they were fighting through the trees.

Turning to Susan and Trumpkin beside him, he muttered, "I'm sorry. This isn't the way I meant to go at all."

Peter looked so frustrated and so exhausted that Susan, who had been rapidly growing more irritable, found herself softening. Gently gripping his shoulder with a faint smile, she leaned over him and pointed at a clearing some yards in the distance. "Look over there, Peter. Isn't that the same creek we passed earlier, as we were coming up to the gorge? It's probably further upstream, but still, it's the same direction—towards the gorge. Mightn't we stop there for a bit, get a drink, and then see about following it back to where we first entered the wood?"

And just for a moment, when he met her eyes, Peter thought he saw a flash of something, a sliver of the Queen she used to be, and without meaning to, he relaxed. "You're right, Su. Of course. Maybe we aren't so badly off as I thought."

It was another matter trying to get there. The trees remained thick, and by the time they had begun to thin and clear out, Peter and Susan, as well as Trumpkin, each had more than their fair share of scrapes and bruises.

So it was with great relief that they dropped down into the slick grass beside the creek half an hour later. Hands and faces and arms and elbows were dipped in the blessedly cool water, and all three of them had a nice, long drink.

It was only as he pulled back, away from the stream, that Peter noticed what—or rather, who—was missing.

IOIOIOIOIOI

In Narnia, Edmund had taken to following on his older brother's heels whenever Peter strayed too far from their camp. It had at first irritated him to no end: Lion's Mane, he had no need of a babysitter!

But when, one evening, he'd managed to slip away from his brother (and their escort) without Edmund's noticing to take a short walk and wash up, he'd very nearly been assassinated.

That had been three years into their reign, and there were still a few remnants of the Fell Creatures that had served the White Witch lurking around the borders of their country. At the time, they had been very near the boundary between Narnia and the Western Wild, investigating rumors of the very same nature. He supposed that should have served as a warning, but he hadn't heeded it.

A Wer-Wulf had attacked him. A particularly large and surly Wer-Wulf who had served quite a few years under the False Queen and was not at all interested in parleying with the Son of Adam whom he saw as being the sole cause of the Witch's downfall.

Peter had only had a fleeting moment to be absurdly grateful that Oreius had insisted he and Edmund carry a sword at all times before the Wer-Wulf had leapt at him with a blood-curdling scream, fangs bared and wicked claws extended.

He had barely managed to pull Rhindon out of its sheath when the Fell Beast abruptly keeled over in mid-flight and dropped heavily onto the undergrowth beside the stream, an arrow embedded deeply in its side and very clearly dead.

He'd looked up at the stream bank and seen a white-faced Edmund in the moonlight shakily unstringing his bow.

When they returned to camp, he had received the tongue-lashing of a lifetime from his younger brother (as well as a highly displeased Oreius) and had listened without a word of complaint.

He never again objected to Edmund's presence after that.

IOIOIOIOIOI

With a searing flash of shame, Peter realized Edmund had never really stopped protecting him like that—even when they returned to England, even when Peter lashed out at everything and everyone around him, including said younger brother.

Even when said younger brother's older brother was too much of a blind fool to see what was right in front of him.

"Susan," he kept his voice deceptively calm as he spoke, straightening up and trying to hide his rising panic, "do you know where Lu is?"

Susan, who had been getting a drink of her own from the stream, now sat back on her heels and pinned him with a puzzled glance, daintily wiping her mouth. "Of course I do, Peter. She's…"

But at that moment Susan realized that of course she didn't know, because Lucy, who had always been kept between them, wasn't there. The only person separating her from Peter was Trumpkin; aside from the Dwarf, there was only a patch of grass and the brook's pebbled shore.

And once she realized that, she also realized that Edmund, who rarely ever left Peter's side, was nowhere in sight, either.

Immediately, Susan paled. "Oh, they can't have!" she burst out.

Because she knew as well as Peter did what had likely happened: Edmund and Lucy had gone across the gorge. They hadn't been there for the past hour and a half.

"How could we not have noticed?" she whispered, voice small.

Peter, his face tight, merely shook his head and stood to his feet, offering her a hand up. "I don't know, Su," he responded painfully as he helped her stand, releasing her hand.

At that moment, a crossbow bolt suddenly flew through the air only inches above their heads and embedded itself with a sharp thwack in the trunk of a nearby fir tree.

"Down!" Trumpkin bellowed, throwing himself to the ground and at the same time forcing an astonished High King down into the bracken.

There was no time to do anything but react. Peter dropped, kicking a startled (and distracted) Susan none-too-gently in the shin.

With a surprised scream, Susan fell heavily on top of him. Even as the air was knocked out of his lungs with the impact, he immediately used her momentum to roll them over so that he was on top and his younger sister was beneath him.

As a half dozen crossbow bolts sailed through the air where they had been standing mere seconds ago, Peter forced her head down, using himself as a shield for her body.

When she realized what he was doing, Susan screamed again. "Peter!"

In the next instant, distant shouts and the crashing of several heavily armored guards through the bracken and undergrowth spurred the three on the bank of the stream to their feet.

"Hurry! Hurry!" Peter gasped, shoving Susan forward towards the higher end of the bank before grabbing Trumpkin by the scruff of his hauberk and practically tossing the Dwarf up onto it, as well. "Back to the gorge! Quick! Crawl, run, do anything, but get back! I'll hold them off!"

"What?!" Susan shrieked, immediately halting her headlong rush and whipping around to face him.

"Now!" he roared, whirling around to face the first of the Telmarines as the man splashed through the creek and drawing Rhindon out of its sheath with a metallic ring as he did so.

He didn't dare look to see if she listened. The Telmarine was on him within moments, and Peter barely had his sword up in time to block the blade that came whistling through the air towards his head.

Their swords met with a titanic clash of steel and Peter cried out at the sudden wrench his shoulders gave.

Seconds later, an arrow whizzed over his shoulder and embedded itself in the Telmarine's throat.

A sickening gurgle and the man clawed at it before dropping to ground, dead.

White-faced, Peter backed up to where an even paler Susan stood on the bank above him, arrow on the string and pulled back to her ear, its sights set on the remaining Telmarines as they dashed through the stream. "I told you to leave!" he gasped out, bringing up his sword and settling into a defensive stance next to her.

There was a sharp twang from the other side of him as Trumpkin loosed his own arrow and picked off yet another advancing Telmarine. Three more appeared to take his place.

Releasing her own arrow into one of them and just as quickly replacing it, Susan retorted tightly, "And then what, Peter? What would have happened?" She released the next arrow and took out two Telmarines in one shot. A second shot from Trumpkin made sure they stayed dead. "As you so astutely observed only a few minutes ago, Edmund isn't here, and neither is Lucy! You would have been alone—you could have died! That would have been a fine thing to tell them, don't you think?"

Peter jumped down from the bank to land in front of her, bringing his sword up and over in an arc and neatly cleaving one soldier's head from his shoulders that had managed to duck past the barrage of arrows Susan and Trumpkin were shooting off. "I had it sorted!" he yelled up to her, spinning and smartly gutting a Telmarine that had crept up behind him, unknowingly echoing his exact words to Edmund in the train station only yesterday.

Two more sharp twangs from above him as Susan and Trumpkin released an arrow each. One rasped over his shoulder. The other sailed past his head. Both found their mark.

"Did you? Did you really, Peter?" Susan demanded, setting another arrow in the string and releasing it into a Telmarine's neck at the same time Peter drove his sword into the man's side. "Because it looked to me like you were sorely outnumbered."

"Weights and whirligigs!" Trumpkin cried, loosing another arrow of his own; this one, like all his others, lodging firmly in a Telmarine. "You two as soon as talk a man's ear off as strike his head off with a sword! Less of that, more of this!" And he released a second arrow into yet another Telmarine who would have cut off Peter's arm had he not at the last moment twisted away.

Only three Telmarine soldiers were left. Two fell to Susan's and Trumpkin's arrows respectively, while the third felt the bite of Peter's sword in the exposed flesh of his neck.

When the last one dropped—dead—into the undergrowth, Peter, Susan, and Trumpkin were left blinking at each other, with the blood pounding in their ears, their hearts pounding in their chests, and a ringing silence pervading the wood all around them.

IOIOIOIOIOI

"I tell you I had it sorted!" Peter yelled some hours later, where he was squaring off against Susan across the campfire.

It was evening. They had since left the fir wood and were now camped at the very edge of it, in a hollow just above where the stream exited the forest and twisted and furled its way through slick grass and rocky soil. Several yards away Trumpkin sat next to it, smoking his pipe as he watched it cascade over the lip of the gorge and into the River Rush below.

"You had no such thing, Peter Pevensie!" Susan retorted sharply, giving her bow one last vigorous rub with the oil cloth, before setting it aside and up against a nearby rock. The oil cloth went back into her quiver which she placed next to her bow before whirling to face him, wearing a fierce scowl. "Exactly what did you hope to accomplish by being dead, Peter?"

Exhausted, sore, and emotionally wrung out, they had decided to sleep there for the night and then attempt to cross the gorge the next morning.

"I intended to protect you," Peter replied tightly, his own look just as fierce as Susan's as he stared her down.

She didn't back off. "And then?" she demanded. "After that? What would have happened, Peter? Without you what would have happened to us? What would have happened to Narnia, with her High King dead?"

"At least then I would've known you were alive! At least then I would've known you were safe! That you weren't gone like--"

/Edmund and Lucy./

To his own absolute horror, Peter felt tears pour down his cheeks.

IOIOIOIOIOI

Peter was the oldest. That meant many things.

He had not the simple faith of his youngest siblings. He did not have the courage to do what Lucy and Edmund surely must have—to blindly trust in what he could not see. He had only a big brother's heart, and the fears of a young man.

In England it was harder to believe that Aslan existed, that something as wonderful as Narnia was real. Because in England, things weren't the same as they were in Narnia, and being the eldest meant something rather different than it had here.

In England it meant that he had to fill their absent father's stead. It meant he could not be a boy, but had to be a man. It meant he had to "act his age" and be an upright, patriotic citizen.

It meant that one day, he might have to fight in England's war. Fight, serve, protect, die…

No one in London knew that England wasn't his country, or that the British weren't his people. England wasn't home. It was a place he had once lived. It was not the place he wanted to die in, nor the place he wanted to die for.

He had no ties to England, nothing there that he cherished, save his family. He had no allegiance to England, no one he had pledged fealty to, save his father, who was off fighting its war.

In England he was expected to be an adult, a soldier…

They did not know he was one already. They did not know he had already been one for over fifteen years.

"Act your age!"

He was once twenty-eight. He still felt like he was twenty-nine.

"Honestly, Peter, would it be too much to ask you to just walk away?"

"I shouldn't have to! I mean, don't you ever get tired of being treated like a kid?"

"Um…we are kids…"

"Well, I wasn't always!"

In Narnia being the eldest meant that he was the High King. It meant that before he grew to be a man, he had become a warrior. It meant that he had led a country and saved a people.

It meant he had learned to love an entire nation, enough that he would die for it without hesitation—and almost had, many times.

He had given himself heart, soul, mind, and body to Narnia. How could England ask of him the same?

It was a very old concept, remembered from the depths of dusty tomes and cobwebbed scrolls: a country and its people were only as healthy, only as prosperous, as their king.

What Peter sometimes still forgot, however, was that Narnia had four monarchs instead of one, and although he may be the High King, Edmund, Lucy, and Susan were King and Queens in their own right, and all four of them were essential to the life and vitality of Narnia.

It had taken Edmund and the girls more than once landing themselves within inches of death to remind Peter of that fact. Edmund in particular had developed the alarming habit of taking off more than his allotted share of years from his older brother's life.

When he did remember, because he was the oldest, Peter saw the guilt as four times his to carry for abandoning Narnia to her fall.

And oh, how very far she had fallen, without her beloved monarchs there.

Logically, Peter knew Narnia would have lost them—lost him—sooner or later, if not to magic then to death. Logically, Peter could no more be held accountable for the whims of time and change than a pebble could for the ripples it caused when falling into a pond. But Peter had never been terribly logical when it came to his emotions.

So he reacted in the only way he knew how: by lashing out.

That he fought with his fists, instead of his sword, only added insult to injury.

"They are cowards and children, Peter! Not warriors and kings!"

Edmund's words, exclaimed in a rare moment of temper two fights before this most recent one, had done little to appease him, and chafed something awful whenever he remembered them.

Especially because Edmund (who had always been his most trusted confidant)…was right.

And because Edmund was right, those words edged their way into Peter's conscious at the most inopportune moments. Usually when he was about to punch an opponent squarely in the face.

The bullies he challenged, the boys he fought…they were nothing like the seasoned warriors he had known here in Narnia: they were not a pompous lord, who had impugned the High King's honor by suggesting that he was too inexperienced and young to lead a country; they were not Oreius, who was the general of an army; they were not Edmund, who was a skilled warrior in his own right.

They were teenagers who had never seen a woman after she had been raped, or a comrade gutted on the field of war.

They had never had a subject die for them, nor vomited from the scent of carrion.

They had never been forced to watch as their younger brother bled out, nor had they ever felt their own lifeblood coat their fingers.

They did not know what it meant to be on the edge of death, and then thrust back into life.

They knew none of this. Peter did.

He knew what made a man moan with pleasure and a woman gasp with delight.

He knew what it meant to carry the weight of an entire kingdom, and how very heavy a crown could feel.

He knew the bite of steel and the pain of tearing flesh.

But he had forgotten what it meant to temper justice with mercy, and honor with humility.

He had forgotten what it meant to be a brother, and what it meant to be a king.

He had forgotten everything…except the fact that he was the oldest and therefore had to be right.

Only now did it occur to him that perhaps he was just as fallen as his beloved country.

Yet a little while is the light with you. Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you; for the one who walks in the dark does not know where he is going.—John 12:35-36

Tbc.