Author's Note: This is the companion piece to This Isn't Home. It isn't necessary to read the first one, but I do make a couple references at the end. Thanks go out to Mercury Gray for planting the idea in my head, and I'm sorry if it didn't turn out exactly as you envisioned. It took a turn of its own about halfway through (I had a different vision, but like this well enough).

Disclaimer: The Chronicles of Narnia is property of C.S. Lewis, Walden Media, etc.

To Home I Have Returned

by Katako-Chan

Helen had said they'd changed. She'd mentioned vaguely in her letters that the children had come back from the countryside different. I'd expected change; war did that to everyone, including children, especially children. I'd expected to see them more grown up, it has been five years since I last saw them, more mature, but on the same level as their classmates.

I was so very wrong.

Perhaps it was because I'd spent five years away at the war, and the rest of the Pevensie household adjusted to fill whatever gap I had left in our routinely daily life. Perhaps that's why Peter was so fiercely protective and fatherly to his younger siblings, why Edmund and Lucy flocked to him with their worries. But that didn't explain Susan. Susan had always been a "little mum," as I often called her before the war, and based upon the way Peter had stepped into the role of surrogate father, I'd expected Susan to become the surrogate mother to her brothers and sister. But instead, I was met with a painted face when I returned home. A painted face, a hollow laugh.

I told myself it was just her way of dealing with the aftereffects of the war. We all had our ways of dealing with it. But I had never thought that my children were so very haunted by the war that they needed to go to such drastic measure of coping. Soldiers needed that, seasoned veterans; people who had been on the front line of battle. I couldn't understand why my children would need to cope in such a way. I had gone willingly to war with the express purpose of keeping the war away from home. Keep it away from my children, from my wife.

Helen didn't tell me they had nightmares, though. Well, she never told me Peter and Edmund had nightmares. They never plagued Susan, and I had only heard Lucy cry out during the night once, and as soon as I had rushed to her bedside, she was calmly asleep again. But the boys, if one of them was sleeping quite normally, the other would be in the midst of a terrible nightmare. It was as if they alternated nights: tonight Peter has a nightmare, tomorrow night Edmund has a nightmare. It was like some heavenly power had an agenda against my poor sons.

And every time I heard thrashing or shouting and hurried over to their room, I was never needed. They comforted each other, helped each other through something only the two of them could understand.

But what really was so horrific that they continued to have nightmares in the way only soldiers like myself could? Helen informed that nothing traumatic or tragic had happened during my five years of absence; the closest things had gotten to being so was the bombing that spurred Helen to send them into the countryside for a time, and she never had nightmares about it, so I can't see how that would be enough to spawn such torture.

Often, I had stood outside their door after hearing the unmistakable symptoms of a nightmare, but their conversations only churned my thoughts all the more into a great mix of confusion.

--

"Shh, shh, Peter, I'm right here. I'm right here, and Lu and Su are in the room over. No one's dead, Peter, Mum and Dad are in their room too. I didn't die at Beruna, Peter, not at the first battle, not at the second. I'm right here. I've always fought by your side, Peter, and I'm always going to. Shh, Pete, it's alright."

--

"Edmund! Ed, oh Aslan, Ed, listen to me! Look at me, I'm right here. The Witch is gone, Ed, she's gone. She's been gone for over a thousand years, probably even longer now. She can't come back. It's not all your fault, Ed; none of it was your fault. We love you, we forgive you. I love you, I forgive you. Edmund, listen to me, she's gone. I'm here, and she's gone. Aslan's here, and she's gone."

--

After another episode, I again loitered outside their room, steeling myself to go in and settle the confusion that had been flitting around in my mind for a good few months. But as I was preparing to open the door, I lost heart at the conversation the boys were having inside.

"P-Peter, you great noble idiot, why c-couldn't you have followed the battle plan? You had to go and be a he-hero. I was handling myself just f-fine, Pete. I designed the plan so you'd lead the charge, as a H-High King should, but I t-told you in the plan, that I w-wasn't being reckless, and had positioned myself to be an effective fighter while remaining safe enough for your r-ridiculous overprotectiveness."

"Look, Edmund, you were slipping up! I saw it with my own eyes! That mace had almost hit you like Jadis' wand so many times, and I couldn't take it. You're my only brother, my younger brother, Ed, and you can't condemn me for wanting you to stay alive." Peter's voice softened from righteous indignation to almost a whisper.

"Then you can't condemn me for wanting my o-older brother to stop being so bloody heroic! Pete, when the mace hit you and there was so much bl-blood, and then the wretched beast took your sword like a battle prize..."

I couldn't listen anymore. I couldn't understand how my two sons had seen as much bloodshed as was present in their nightmares. They had only been to the countryside, where it was safe and the Germans didn't throw bombs down from the skies.

The way they spoke of their battles was so different from ours, from mine. Swords? Swords hadn't been used in combat for so long! And the sheer absurdity that two seventeen and fifteen year old boys had experienced this amount of war and grief and sorrow! Yet whose subconscious mind could conjure up such horrors if he or she hadn't come into contact with them at some point in time? Surely those years of play fighting with sticks as swords in the back garden hadn't evolved into this nightmare?

And yet, I felt as if their nightmares were true. There was no way I could think of, and anyone else would have felt that the war had spurred them into creating nonsense, but their was a truth in their words. Helen had said she'd once overheard them talking about a place called Narnia with a Lion they revered with the name Aslan. Then, I had blown it off as childhood games, but now I understood. My children had grown up far more than one was expected to grow after being evacuees of a war. They had grown up from being in the midst of a war themselves: in the midst of all the sorrow, hardship, and tiny inklings of joy. Somehow, some way, they had obtained a regality that no one could have possibly taught them.