Chapter Text
Growing up, child
Is just a matter of time
So, won't you dance under the sun?
Growing old
Feels like you're giving up your soul
Growing Up by Run River North
30 September, 1940 | 11:02 pm | Professor Kirke's House, England | Lucy
The woods were dark and silent when the white wolf stepped into the moonlight.
Snow lay thick on the ground and icicles sparkled on the limbs of the trees. There was no wind and no birds sang at night, so Lucy could hear every crunch of the wolf’s paws as it stalked closer, lithe and graceful and deadly. She tried to back away, but found that her feet wouldn’t move. She was frozen to the spot. Her heart pounded in her ears and a scream tore itself out of her mouth. The wolf lunged, sharp teeth and golden eyes gleaming, and closed its jaws around her throat.
The nightmare ripped like wet paper and Lucy woke abruptly. The room was dark and unfamiliar and, for an instant, she didn’t know where she was. Focusing on calming her racing heartbeat, she told herself things that were true. They were in the country, in the manor house of the old professor. It was wartime. That was Susan breathing quietly in the next bed over, and Peter whose snores could be heard through the wall. The dim gray light through the window meant it was only an hour or two from dawn. This was real. Real. There were no moonlit forests, no wolves. There would be toast and jam and hot tea for breakfast—no sugar, of course, because of the rationing—and lessons in the morning and perhaps it would be warm enough after lunch to escape to the outdoors.
Sleep had just begun to creep over her once more when there was a creak and a thump in the hall, like a door being swung shut. Lucy was suddenly and unpleasantly awake again. Someone cursed in a low voice, accompanied by another thump, and she relaxed. It was only Edmund, probably getting up for the loo. But his footsteps were going the wrong way, up towards the stairwell instead of down the hall. Unable to quell her curiosity, Lucy slid out from between her warm blankets and picked up the dim candle that burned on her bedside table.
Shivering in her thin nightdress, with nothing between her bare feet and the cold stone floor, she crept out of the room she shared with Susan, careful to let the door swing quietly shut behind. The hall was empty, lit only by the moonlight through a window and the solitary candle in her hand.
A creak somewhere above her head reassured her that she hadn’t imagined her brother’s footsteps outside, so Lucy gathered her courage and set off toward the stairwell.
She found him in a high attic room. The garret was unfamiliar to her, despite the many hours spent playing hide-and-seek the last few days. It was covered in dust and empty but for a large, carved wardrobe in the corner. Edmund sat on the floor, leaning against the wardrobe. Like her, he wore only his nightclothes but had evidently had the forethought to bring a blanket, which he had wound tightly around his shoulders. His head was buried in his drawn up knees and his shoulders quaked with silent gasps of breath.
He didn’t react to her presence, even as Lucy sat beside him and pulled a corner of the blanket over her own lap, setting the candle in its holder off to the side so it didn’t catch the blanket. She didn’t speak, allowing Edmund the space to deal with . . . whatever was troubling him. Lucy had to admit, she was at a loss. Never before had Edmund been so vulnerable and emotional in her presence, except perhaps when they were very small children.
The candle had dwindled to only a stub when Edmund finally spoke. His voice was muffled. “If I told you something crazy, would you think I was crazy?”
Lucy’s brow furrowed. “No.”
“Would you believe me if I swore it was true, no matter how unbelievable it sounds?”
Lucy laughed weakly. “Edmund, who do you think you’re talking to?”
He lifted his head at last, and Lucy had to stifle a gasp. His face was blotchy and wet with tears. His eyes were red from what must have been hours of crying. Her perfectly put-together brother who had scoffed at her for crying when they had had to leave Finchley, who had told her that Father Christmas wasn’t real and to stop acting like a baby, Lucy, was gone. In his place was someone unfamiliar, someone Lucy wasn’t sure she knew.
“Still,” he said, staring at her so seriously that she couldn’t help but respond honestly.
“Yes,” she said. “Of course.”
“If I asked you to keep it a secret, even from Peter and Susan, would you?”
This was the first time Lucy could remember that Edmund had ever asked her to keep a secret for him, had ever trusted her with something as precious as his jealously guarded secrets. Lucy, contrary to what many believed, was not stupid. She was naive, perhaps, and tended to look for the best in people. She would readily admit herself that she could be quite gullible and trusted easily. She was, by nature, an open person who was unused to hiding even the slightest thing. But she was not, and had never been, stupid. She recognized this for the opportunity it was and did not squander the chance to grow closer to her aloof older brother.
“Yes,” she said once more, holding his gaze. “Yes, I will keep your secret.”
Edmund exhaled softly and his entire body seemed to melt with it, as though his bones had collapsed inside his skin. He turned his face away and looked at the large wardrobe behind them. In his eyes was something like desperation, something like grief, and Lucy wondered what had happened to give him the same look as the people who climbed from bunkers and tube stations and cellars to find their homes and families vanished beneath a pile of rubble and dust.
Just when she began to think that perhaps he wouldn’t say anything else after all, Edmund opened his mouth and out came words like a dam breaking, one pouring over another in an endless stream. “Five days ago, I ran away from that fight with Peter and I came to this room. I went into the wardrobe, but the door blew shut. It was pitch black and when I finally found my way out again . . . I wasn’t in this room anymore. There was a forest, at dawn. It was covered in snow, like the middle of winter. There was no one there and I couldn’t find the way back through to your—to England.”
Lucy listened quietly as Edmund spun his increasingly unbelievable tale. Part of her wondered if this was just another trick, another fiction to relay to Peter later: Guess what I got our idiot sister to believe this time! But no—that wasn’t fair. Edmund hadn’t done anything like that in ages, and besides, there was no way he could—or would take the effort to—fake the pained expression on his face as he talked or the way his voice cracked. She decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.
“I got lost,” Edmund said. “In the forest. I don’t really remember, I think I wandered around for a while. But then I found the lamppost.”
“A lamppost?” Lucy asked, unable to keep the incredulous tone out of her voice.
Edmund nodded, laughing a little. “Yes. A real lamppost with a flame burning inside, just there in the middle of the wood. It was like it had just sprung out of the ground.”
“A lamppost,” Lucy said, unable to keep the skeptical tone from her voice. “Alright.” He was already asking her to believe that there was a forest inside the wardrobe, so she saw no reason why a lamppost was out of the question.
“Anyway, I was by the lamppost and starting to wonder if I’d dreamed the whole thing, when I heard noises in the trees. I called out, asked who it was, and someone responded. They asked if I was human, as though they were not. But before I could do anything, I was knocked unconscious.”
“Unconscious!” Lucy gasped. “Are you alright?”
Edmund looked at her a little oddly, like it had never occurred to him that he might have been injured. “Of course. It was years ag— Never mind.”
“No,” Lucy protested, feeling a slow, creeping sensation of dread crawl up her spine. “What were you going to say? Were you about to say that it was years ago?”
“No!” Edmund said hotly, then blushed, looking guilty. “Actually, yes. I was. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to reveal it all at once. It is rather overwhelming for me, and I lived it all. I know it would only make you worry to know how long I’ve really been gone.”
“And how long is that?” asked Lucy. Her heart felt like it had stopped completely, like maybe someone had reached into her chest and frozen it solid. He had said years. Years. Years wasn’t something you made up to fool your gullible little sister. If he had wanted to trick her, he would have spun a much less fantastical tale. Years wasn’t at all believable, which was exactly what made her inclined to believe it could— possibly, maybe— be true. “ How many years?”
Edmund sighed. “Fifteen.”
Lucy’s heart didn’t stop. It didn’t freeze. Instead, she felt as though it had simply vanished from her chest, leaving nothing but a gaping hole the span of fifteen years. Fifteen years that Edmund had spent alone, in the strange land he told her of—that he somehow wasn’t lying about. Fifteen years that left such a toll on him that it was visible—apparent in the way he looked longingly at the wardrobe and cried without any fear of who might see and judge his tears. It was obvious in the way he had so dramatically changed from a moody, irritable child with a mean streak a mile wide to a withdrawn, soft-spoken young man within the course of a night. Or rather, she realized, not within a night at all. Within half a lifetime spent in an entirely different world.
Lucy was startled to notice that she was crying.