December 1947: Edmund and Susan return from the cinema, but nothing is simple for exiled monarchs.

"In Stony Places"

When they exit the cinema, Susan is smiling and Edmund feels a flash of smugness. He had to coax his sister out, luring her with Dean Farrell and promises that it would be his treat, but the results were worth it. By the time the feature started, she'd relaxed. He had whispered commentary in her ear, and she had curled close to him in the theatre seats, their hands dueling in the popcorn bucket. Now he regrets not choosing a double feature, although the walk home stretches before them and it will be coming on dark soon enough. Winter has barely taken hold, but night still comes quickly.

They cross the street, stepping carefully on damp and icy curbs. He doesn't quite dare take Susan's hand, so he just matches his steps to hers, walking so close their coat sleeves brush.

"Wasn't the landscape beautiful?" Susan says, making no move to restore distance.

"Gorgeous," he agrees.

"I wonder how accurate it was?"

"Perhaps we'll see for ourselves someday."

Susan laughs the light, flirtatious laugh she's perfected lately. "Oh, I don't know. Travel is wonderful, but I don't think I'd want to go to the end of the world like that."

"The view's worth it, though," Edmund says.

There aren't many cars out - petrol is still rationed - but there are enough to turn the edges of the road into soupy brown mush. Susan tries to pick a way around one particularly deep puddle at the corner three streets from the cinema. Edmund hops it effortlessly and turns back to set his hands around her waist and lift her over as easily as he'd spun her through the figures of Narnian dances. Her hands linger on his shoulders for a moment after he sets her back on her feet. He wishes he could freeze time.

Too soon and not soon enough, she pulls away, straightening her coat and hair with brisk hands. "It's cold," Susan complains. She slides a hand into her bag, producing an elegant cigarette case. Unfortunately, when she opens it, it is empty. "Damn."

Edmund pulls an ordinary cardboard pack and a zippo from his coat pocket. "Not your brand," he apologizes, shaking two into his hand.

"I don't care," she replies, as he expected she would.

Balancing both between his lips, he lights them at the same flame before passing one to her. She takes it with a nonchalance that suits her better than the studied sophistication she's been wearing lately.

He watches her draw on the slim shaft and has to look away, flicking ash from his own so violently he nearly snaps it.

A passing car sends a spray of slush over the pavement. They skip aside to avoid the splash, more or less successfully.

"Blasted slush," Edmund grumbles, thinking of a clean, white winter and snow like powdered sugar.

This world is dressed in shades of grey, so that the red slash of Susan's painted lips and the glowing tip of the cigarette stand out starkly against the concrete backdrop of London. Everything is winter-bleached, the few trees bare and their bark darkened with soot until they rise against the flat steel sky like twisted ironwork; growing lampposts beside the manufactured ones. They fit in this monochromatic scheme, the pair of them, pale and dark. England has drained the rose and copper from them until they melt into the landscape of pavement and slush.

"At least it's a mild winter." He glances at her, taking in the paleness of her skin above the black collar of her coat. Even the cold air has failed to kiss color into her cheeks. She looks like a ghost, and he shivers, thinking of harbingers and fetches, faded copies that foretell doom. Whose? He's always been able to see himself in her, even when the glass lies.

He doesn't recognize himself in the mirror these days. It's more than being the wrong age; he's had years to get used to that. There's something different about his reflection, a thinness of shoulders and chest, a smoothness to his jaw and cheeks, and a dullness in skin and hair he's never seen before. This is not the man he was, this English schoolboy. And therein lies the difference, for he ceased to be a child long ago, but England has locked him into a perpetual boyhood that sits ill and makes of his reflection a stranger.

Susan, too, is not what he expects to see, when he looks to her expecting to find himself. They are still alike enough, but something has shifted. Like looking at the glass through a film of water. Refraction. From the Latin - thank you, Susan - fractus, -a, -um, meaning broken. Also the root of fracture.

He doesn't blame her for painting in the missing portions of her reflection.

"I'd rather the blizzards." But not quite, because there aren't any dryads here to coax food from the frozen ground.

"You don't mean that."

He wishes he could ask her what he does mean.

Six streets from the cinema, their desultory conversation about the film has petered out, leaving a silence warmer than the smoke Edmund draws into his lungs. He glances over at her, breathing in burning leaves and burning city, a smoke-wreathed Sybil waiting for release. The smoke mingles with the chill-fog of her breath on every exhalation, so that she seems to have some internal fire. Like a dragon, he thinks, except his cousin isn't here, and blows a cloud of his own. He thinks of Calormen and other lands that hold smoke carries prayers, and the clans in Narnia who count incense carried on a west wind lucky, for it blows your words to the feet of Emperor-over-Sea. Edmund breathes smoke again, watches it twist on the wind. South. Just as well; there are also Dwarf clans who won't smoke facing east.

He tips back his head to watch the smoke curl into the sky, joining the exhalations of a thousand chimneys, and wonders if any prayer could pass through that cloaking pall. Smoke purifies, he thinks, remembering smoldering fires covered over with seaweed, smoke and salt together for a blessing, but it is hard to believe this ashy, oily stuff could cleanse anything.

Smoke also perfumes the dead.

They are more than half-dead themselves, if death is the ending of a life. Edmund has started over so many times he's had to stop counting; no one had told him those chosen by cats also had nine lives. He's not even certain where one ends and another begins anymore. All of them exist in a perpetual January, and the gates between lives aren't as simple as the shutting of a wardrobe door. In some ways it's easier now that the gate is locked in both directions; they've never had the keeping of the keys, but they were expected to cross the portal freely.

He has twice passed through doorways that were nothing but threshold. Those gates mock Janus, showing only one face to the world. The first step is a blind leap towards a destination concealed until it is reached, and once through, the past is obscured in turn. But the veil of memory still hands between the traveler and the new world. You can walk with certain step in the shadowed lands or you can burn away the ties to drift unrooted on brighter paths. It's not exactly freedom, only a lightness marred by the weight of forgotten history, but the only way to keep your past and future whole is to hover on the threshold.

Edmund has been a general. He knows what happens to those trapped in the gateway.

Above them, the pyres of the city smoke onwards, adding their funereal pall to the burgeoning winter clouds. Nothing else moves in that sky, and though he listens he hears no birdsong. Not even the mournful winter tunes of the robin or the harsh crow calls break the grave stillness. No squirrels chase each other through the skeletal trees; no strays scratch about the dustbins or gaze hopefully at passers-by. There is nothing here but the stone and people and the things they build to fill the empty spaces. The good earth is locked away beneath impregnable concrete barricades or trammeled to postage-stamp yards, each neatly bordered lest too much wildness escape. The emptiness of these places shakes him to his own hollowed core.

Edmund's life has always been defined by shades of grey, but never before has he lived among them. Drifting with the other souls in this aboveground Erebus, he longs for the certainty of dichotomy to ground him. Each day here yields a sip of Lethe's waters. Whether that's blessing or curse he has never been able to tell.

It isn't their land, but they're dying right along with it anyway - or maybe it's dying with them, condemned to burning wasteland by the wounds of not one but four sovereigns. The brilliance of fireflowers has no place in this land of ash.

"Hardly anyone's entertaining this year," Susan says, apparently to the lamppost on the corner five streets from the house.

"Saving up for Christmas parties, I expect," he tells the kerb, and she nods an agreement he sees from the corner of his eye.

"I think I've enough coupons for a brand-new dress this year."

Her cheer is laid on so thick it's brittle, but he pretends not to hear. She's not the only one with masks to juggle. He wants to remove his, to just be, but it's difficult to let go knowing she won't do the same. Like being naked. Once it wouldn't have been a problem. They hadn't needed those trappings, free to bare their guileless selves as they couldn't do with others. Even with Peter and Lucy there were roles to play. But they are the middle children; the fierce protectiveness of the eldest and the bright optimism of the youngest are not for them. He says, "That's good."

You never used to hide from me, he thinks of saying, but that would break the rules. There are certain lines they must adhere to as they play their parts. He does not say 'do you remember' like Lucy. He does not say 'you must remember' like Peter. He respects her silence by granting his own, even if it leaves a dozen things unsaid between them. They don't need the words. They didn't need the words. Maybe it's changed, since they walked between worlds, but Edmund is reluctant to crack a fragile tie. There are enough cracks in their lives already, all of them falling into the spaces between, cracked and cracking, themselves, each other. If silence can be glue, he'll lay it on thick. Something needs to bind them together; they are made too many things to too many people. They can save entire countries but not themselves.

There is a word Edmund thinks he should know, for what they've become. Chimera. A monster neither one thing nor another, but something of both. Fitting, that they should become like their subjects. Except the Narnians were never monsters. He isn't sure whether they are. Unnatural, certainly, at least by the laws of English nature. But that's always been the problem. Here, where even the elements are mixed, how can anyone expect to know who they are?

Two streets from the house, the light is fading, making their footing treacherous. Susan slips on a bit of black ice hidden beneath the slush, and he catches her arm, steadying her until she finds her footing again. This is how they are, forever tripping over hidden falls, and he struggles against the knowledge that he cannot catch her forever.

She pulls away, straightening in offended dignity like a tiger caught in kittenish behavior. He watches the grey sky down the valley of ordered houses, politely accepting the fiction that nothing happened. "Almost home," he says.

"No, we're not."

There's nothing to say to that, so he doesn't even try, but pulls the pack from his pocket, taps it until a cigarette pokes free. "Last one," he says, and because some courtesies are the same here, extends it to her.

"We'll share." She dips her head to take it between her lips. He pulls away the empty pack, crumpling it absently in his fist, and flicks the lighter with his other hand, holding the tiny flame to the end of the cigarette for her.

Ahead of them he can see the house, as proud and as humble as its neighbors, the same bones but different flesh. Without discussion their steps slow, prolonging their journey despite the bracing chill. Susan passes him the cigarette and he takes a drag, savoring the faint wax taste of her lipstick against his lips. Edmund finds himself ticking off landmarks: the twisted elm leaning over the walk; the bright blue postbox, monument to a neighbor's bad taste; the neatly clipped line of the brick-and-boxwood wall around the corner house. On their right, the hole of number 16, gone to a Jerry bomb years past, gathers the twilight to itself. The rubble is long since cleared away, but the foundation sits stark in the middle of the lot, half out of place among the living houses with the yard and walk neatly tended under the muffling layer of snow, so that you could ignore the gaping hole if you kept your eyes down.

They are like this, presenting a clean front to the world while a gap opens within them, a hole in the center of life like a hollow tree unnoticed until the felling storm. The outside can be patched, but there are gaps inside that no cosmetics can conceal; the house can be rebuilt, but not them.

The wind is picking up and they pause in the little shelter of the back step, huddled together passing the last stub of cigarette between them.

In the gloaming, everything seems just a fraction off, the strange light playing tricks with the familiar. Edmund's gaze wanders the yard, skimming over the low-mounded rise of the old bomb shelter, now home to tools, preserved goods, and the odds and ends which collect in any storage space. Beyond it, the churned earth of their war garden waiting for spring to come again, half hidden under its winter blanket. He lets his eyes travel further, over sticky black mud, grey slush, white picket fence, the circumscribed borders of their journey's end.

He leans against the doorframe, abruptly realizing the cigarette is in danger of scorching his fingers. Susan's are daintier; he offers her the last draw. She takes it, pinching out the stub and scattering the last fall of ash and tobacco flakes like an offering across the frozen earth.

"That's it, then." She isn't talking about the cigarette.

"It doesn't have to be." Neither is he.

There is a long stillness, long enough that a half-wild hope seizes in Edmund's chest. "Su-"

"Oh, Ed," and the weariness in her voice breaks him, "haven't we already crossed that bridge?"

Edmund says, "Bridges can be crossed in two directions."

"Not if they burn behind you," Susan muses.

He has no answer for that, and she gives him no time to find one, but brushes past him into the house, the heat of her skin suddenly strong even through their winter coats. He stands there, the cold seeping into his toes lost against a very different numbness, until the night is drawn down fully and it begins to snow again. He blinks up into it, letting the flakes gather on his lashes. Moved by some childish impulse, he puts his tongue out to catch one, and tastes only ash.

-Fin-

Author's Notes:

The film Edmund and Susan see is Black Narcissus, which did in fact come out in 1947 (though not in the winter. *handwaves*).

The winter of '46-'47 was the worst of the century to date, so while the winter of '47-'48 is described as 'average' in the references I can find, compared to food- and fuel-shortage inducing blizzards, it would qualify as mild!

Title from T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland." Significant inspirational credit also goes to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a quote from which informed that last scene. There are enough other paraphrases and references in here that I would need to use academic-style footnoting to get them all. Suffice to say, if you think I swiped it out of the literary canon, I probably did.

And as always, I don't own Narnia.