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Reflecting in a Watery Mirror. Tirian/Peter. R. Birthday fic for Bedlam.
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bedlamsbard's birthday, and this is for her. For you, you big crackwhore! It's a fic of a fic, specifically of her ongoing fic Dust in the Air, which is this crazy epic of fantasy worldbuilding, very disgruntled Pevensies, and (of course) 'Last Battle' revisionism.
How do disclaimers work in this case? The characters are hers except when they're Lewis's, but the work is sort of mine except when they're hers. OR SOMETHING.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, O DELIGHT OF MINE EYES. <3333333333
Reflecting in a Watery Mirror
Narnia:Dustverse. Peter/Tirian. Rated R for kings getting it on. Thank you to the fabulouszempasuchil for doing beta duty.
A missing scene between chapter 6 and 7.
“I highly doubt that!” comes Lucy’s shrill voice. Whatever she says next is lost amid Peter’s protestations.
Tirian looks up from polishing his sword, and a she-centaur nearby flicks her tail as she considers the woods, the source of the shouting. Of the argument, Tirian can make out ‘traitor’, ‘Susan’, and ‘Aslan’ but the rest is unintelligible. A couple of minutes later, Lucy emerges from the tree-line, her eyes hard and her mouth set in a thin line.
“Your majesty,” Tirian greets her, and is ignored as she rushes past him.
Peter appears a few seconds later. Whatever anger Tirian had heard in his voice earlier, it is not writ on his face. The High King’s carriage is not one of peace, but neither is it one of being particularly put out, except perhaps for a sag in the shoulders. When Tirian greets him, Peter says, “Tell me, Tirian, do you have any siblings?”
“No, sire.”
“Well, consider yourself lucky.”
He hesitates. “Surely you don’t mean that, your majesty?”
“Mean what? Considering you lucky?” Peter contemplates this. “True, I suppose you haven’t been very lucky at all recently.”
“That’s… not exactly what I meant.”
The High King laughs. “I know what you meant, Tirian. Listen, I love my sisters and my brother with, if not all my heart, then with most of it. It’s just very inconvenient to love people who are so determined to hate each other.”
Tirian laughs with him, though it is a weaker laugh. The Narnians have been unsure what to make of King Edmund and Queen Susan’s recent reconciliation. On the one hand, this means less of Edmund and Susan pulling knives on each other at breakfast – always a good thing – but on the other hand, the reconciliation has made Queen Lucy increasingly peevish. Now she stands by herself against her siblings, and it puts Tirian in mind of how an animal can be twice as dangerous when it thinks itself cornered and alone.
Peter continues, “I’m sure you’re familiar with that problem, being king. Or former king. Or king-to-be, twice over, I don’t know. Once a king of Narnia, always, and beyond that I don’t keep track of the details.”
Tirian would expect to hear bitterness in his voice accompanying such words. Perhaps wistfulness, or resentment, but he hears only Peter’s typical confidence – acceptance, not submission. Tirian says, “What does that matter in the end, your majesty, for you are the High King of Narnia,” and the words feel uncomfortable on his tongue. If Peter needs no reassurance, then possibly Tirian is only trying to reassure himself. “You are king over all kings and maker of a golden age.”
“I am a man who loves my country,” Peter replies, “and sometimes that is all I know.”
And Tirian wants to say yes, he wants to say me too but, like before, he fears being presumptuous. He circumvents with, “An honorable man always does,” and feels silly about it, because how is it presumptuous to love one’s country? Tirian has spent the past many weeks observing the High King and his siblings, trying to divine some common ground between their reign and his. Now that he is finally relating to Peter, he feels only vaguely unsettled, unsure of how to pursue this potential intimacy, or whether he should at all.
So Tirian says, “Is Queen Lucy all right?”
“Of course. Lucy can take care of herself. I won’t envy anyone who crosses her, especially in her state. Then again, I can say the same of Susan. And that’s where things get sticky, I suppose.”
He nods. “Family will fight each other, but they will also fight for each other.”
Peter turns a gaze on him that is somehow perfectly crafted for making people regret whatever they just said. “I don’t need someone lecturing me on what my family will fight for,” he says coolly.
“Of course. Forgive me,” Tirian murmurs. “I don’t mean to overstep my boundaries.”
“Of course you don’t,” Peter snaps, and looks as if he might say something more, but then doesn’t.
Tirian turns his attention back to polishing his sword, his face heated. He is acutely aware that he and Peter are alone in this corner of the camp. Over the past few minutes, the other Narnians had drifted away from this place, found business to attend to elsewhere. The Pevensies - and especially Peter - still inspire fear and awe among them; the four sovereigns’ tendencies towards rash decisions, infighting, and efficient fearless killing have not helped in this matter. Most of the Narnians have developed the habit of giving the Pevensies a wide berth. The High King and his family may react with dismay and frustration at the averted eyes and self-abasement, but in the end, hundreds of years of mythology are difficult to escape.
“But I’ll concede to you this,” Peter continues, “and I don’t make concessions easily: this war is the only thing in six years that have brought my sisters to the same side of a fight. And, by the Seven, they’re still at odds.”
“One only has to look around our camp, your majesty, to see that the Calormenes have brought together many former enemies under a common cause,” says Tirian. “Old grudges put to bed to make space for new ones. One of the ironies of war, that it should bring people together as deftly as it takes them apart.”
“The ironies of war,” Peter echoes dryly, and again Tirian wishes he had kept his mouth shut. But instead of further rebuke, the High King just sighs and looks away. And just as Tirian is about to excuse himself, Peter says, in a softer tone, “We are coming together again, my siblings and I. It’s slow and painful and it won’t be the same – we aren’t the same – but…” He shrugs, and suddenly seems more boy than king. “But we never return to the same Narnia, so I suppose why should we return as the same Pevensies?”
“Your majesty?”
“But you have to figure,” Peter continues, “there has to be some unchanging element in Narnia, in ourselves. Something that makes us what we are, no matter what has been taken from us or how we’ve been divided.”
“Like what?”
“Our scars,” the High King replies. “Our scars are reclaiming us.”
Then, in a moment that has Tirian thinking (not for the first time) ‘your majesty, what on the blessed earth is going through your head’, Peter takes off his clothes from the waist up. Winter is not yet over, and although the days are warmer than they have been in recent months, the air is still chilly. One’s breath still mists at night. It’s far from shirtless weather, but Peter doesn’t seem to mind a bit. Instead, he shows his back to Tirian and says, “I’ve gotten these scars three times.”
He had pieced the Pevensies’ story through their arguments and idle chatter, and Peter fills in more blanks now. After fifteen years of ruling as prophesied monarchs, they stumbled back into their own world and became children again. “Every time we were returned to England, we were always returned in the state we left it in.” Like some gift of reincarnation and eternal youth that they never asked for. Tirian notices that Peter says ‘we were returned’ –not ‘we returned’ – like the kings and queens are books from a library, unable to keep their own stories for themselves. In England, Narnia existed only in their heads and hearts, in the stories they told each other. Narnia came to life in bursts of muscle memory, and in the familiar scars that flowered across their skin.
They always come back, Peter explains. Each one of these scars, like adults coming back to old childhood haunts and finding they still remember where the hidden paths are. He tells Tirian about wars against the Westron nations, about his time with the Red Company, about the Narnian Revolution from King Caspian X’s time, and about World War Two back in his own world, pointing out the corresponding scars. “People in England would ask me how I got them, and I have to take a second to make sure I don’t say ‘fighting the kraken,’ or ‘dueling a usurper to the throne’, although I wouldn’t be lying. Those are just a few of the many truths available to me. These,” he gestures to his scars, “are the shape of them. The only things to have stayed constant across two worlds.”
A breeze blows from the east that makes Tirian wrap his cloak tighter around himself, but Peter does nothing more than grit his teeth and hold out his left hand. “Soon,” says Peter, waggling his little finger, “this finger will be gone.”
Tirian sheathes his sword. “How do you think it will come off this time?”
“Haven’t a clue,” Peter shrugs, pulling his shirt back on, “but I look forward to finding out.”
He smiles. “I suppose if one knows how a story is going to end, what makes the story interesting is the telling of it.”
“The telling of it may be the interesting part, but it’s the ending that’s a comfort. Tell me, Tirian,” the High King says, “have you any scars?”
There is something in Peter’s eyes that is curious and calculating. Having been both a king and an ousted king, Tirian is used to people making snap judgments about him based on looks and hearsay. He feels no anxiety at being sized up, but being used to it doesn’t mean he likes it. Tirian has never liked feeling like he is being deliberated and probed for answers, like the way Peter is looking at him now.
He replies, “Yes. Yes, I do, I have some.”
Peter says, “Show me.”
Tirian can take it or leave it; he can say no out of propriety and how cold it is outside. Or, he can doff his shirt and see what happens next. Maybe the High King just wants to give Tirian grief by making him to stand shirtless in the cold. Tirian wouldn’t put that past him.
In the end, Tirian stands, props his sword against a nearby rock, and pulls off his clothes. He tenses against the cold, quietly commanding his body to not shiver overmuch.
Peter says, “Tell me about them, about your scars.”
Tirian points to where arrows have pierced him and swords have cut him, tells Peter about battles and tournaments, routs and skirmishes. (He leaves out the story of the gash at the small of his back. That one he got in his youth, making a drunken escape from the bedchamber of a patrician’s daughter in the Garden District. The story involves being chased by dogs, falling down the stairs, and – quite similarly to the present situation – not enough clothes, and Tirian would rather Peter not know about it.) The High King asks questions about the weaponry, and draws on intact knowledge from a thousand years ago to comment on the characters in Tirian’s stories. Tirian learns that the Anskettmen were a rough and practical people even in ancient times, and that the renowned Shoushani spirit of solidarity and industry is actually a more recent phenomenon.
“In my day, we used to say that three Shoushani men are enough to make six political parties,” says Peter.
It feels good to tell these stories, howsoever much Tirian wishes he were telling them fully-dressed. He hasn’t told these stories in ages. Who wants to listen to the stories of the disgraced king of Narnia? But Peter listens and, to his relief, there is no pity on the High King’s face, or at least none that he can detect. Peter’s half of the conversation is peppered with liberal criticism of Tirian’s sense of military strategy, which flusters Tirian but does not deter him. Tirian is reliving the past through its retelling, and the nostalgia is intoxicating.
It takes a shorter time for him to get to the tale of his most recent scar. His scars only have one story, after all. He touches a mesh of hardened skin where his neck curves into his shoulder and says, “This one brought me the closest to death.”
And Peter reaches out and touches it with easy casualness. Tirian swallows, looks away. He doesn’t know how to begin asking, “Do you know this? Do you know how to treasure memories no one else believes in anymore?” Tirian can’t find the words, doesn’t know his own motivation, but the High King’s touch is feather-light as he traces the shape of Tirian’s scar, the gentlest Tirian has ever seen the High King with someone outside of his family.
“That’s a sizeable one,” Peter murmurs, his thumb on Tirian’s jawline as his fingers lightly stroke the side of Tirian’s neck. “Not from a sword. A little too messy for a knife…”
Tirian has not been imprisoned and in hiding for so long that he has forgotten the royal manner of leaving things between the lines. That way, nothing ever has to be said and nothing ever has to be offered, and everyone can retain their pretensions. The world in which it is possible to communicate so much in few words and a few subtle gestures is a world of rigid boundaries – and who is more rigidly bound than the king? It is all coming back to him from just one touch lingering longer than it should, and Tirian takes a shaky breath and says, “It was a Calormene arrow, your majesty.”
The Calormenes’ dawn raid had caught his troops unaware. The arrow missed, but barely, sinking itself into the tree behind him. It had been close enough to rip out a considerable chunk of flesh. There was a lot of blood (and a lot of screaming, and a lot of death, and too many things happening all at once. Tirian remembers a few petrified seconds where he didn’t know whether he should call for help for himself or for the dying men around him).
“Were you frightened?” asks Peter.
Loyalty to the High King wins out over pride, and Tirian replies, “I was terrified.”
Peter nods, running his knuckles gently over Tirian’s ribs. It is an unwarranted familiarity and Tirian tries not to flinch, doesn’t know whether he should step away or let Peter continue to touch him.
The High King says, “You are all skin and bones, your highness.”
“Food is scarce, your majesty.”
“Yes.”
Peter trails his fingers up over his chest, skimming his throat, and lifts Tirian’s chin to look into his eyes. The High King’s gaze is steady and knowing, and when his hand alights on his cheek, Tirian shivers. Nothing truly offered, and nothing truly said.
“Cold, Tirian? I’m sorry, I just found your stories too fascinating,” says Peter, who doesn’t sound sorry at all. “Put on your clothes and come with me. I have wine back at my place. Let’s you and me escape this chill.”
Tirian hurriedly tugs on his clothes, although by now the clothes are as cold as the rock he laid them on. He grits his teeth to keep them from chattering. When he has tucked his sword into his belt loop, Peter raises his eyebrows, still waiting for an answer.
And Tirian can take it or leave it. He can decline and instead make his way over to the kitchen and scavenge leftovers from lunch. Or he can say yes to the wine, and see what happens next, which pretensions he’ll get to keep.
“Are you shy?” Peter asks. “Come now, we are both kings here, of a sort.”
“That’s gracious of you, your majesty,” says Tirian, and ventures a smile. “I would appreciate that, thank you.”
Peter cocks his head in the direction of his homewood tree, and they start walking.
+
The wine is beginning to pick up the taste of the leather it’s in, but it is still sweet and it does warm him. The fireplace helps too. He and Peter are sitting cross-legged on the floor before it, passing the wineskin between them like old friends. It gives Tirian an odd feeling to be here, to do this, and he enjoys it guardedly.
Tirian asks, “You sleep here with your brother?”
“I used to. He sleeps here with Lucy. I sleep with Susan upstairs, because Lucy won’t sleep with Susan.” He shrugs. “It’s warmer down here anyway.”
“Where are your siblings now?”
Peter smiles wryly. “I don’t know. I’m not their keeper.”
“But you are their High King.”
“I’m also their older brother, and they remember that before High King most of the time.”
It’s warm inside the homewood tree, and it turns out that a Peter with wine in him is a Peter who is easy with his affections: a hand on Tirian’s arm here, a brotherly shove there. They wend their way through a conversation riddled with historical anecdotes (or personal anecdotes, in Peter’s case) and camp gossip until Tirian finds himself being offered the last gulp of wine. There hadn’t been that much to begin with, but far be it from a well-bred king of Narnia to refuse hospitality from his host, or at least that’s what Tirian tells himself. Emboldened by wine and Peter’s current amiability, Tirian leans in close to enact the part of the story where the Galman soldier is conspiring with the priest. Peter turns his face so that their mouths are very close, which makes Tirian draw back slightly. The High King’s eyes are very blue, placid, and Tirian watches them as he divulges the secrets of a Galman noble house to an old priest who, as it turns out, is also a Natarene spy.
Nothing truly said nor offered.
Still, when Peter finally kisses him, Tirian’s heart pounds.
He freezes for a second or two before kissing back.
+
Between being ousted, imprisoned, and on the run, Tirian has not found the time for sex, and he finds himself submitting to Peter and reveling in the feel of so much warm skin pressed against him Likewise, Peter uses his teeth and isn’t afraid to bruise.
Tirian prefers women to men, but he has had his share of the latter. Men who bent to him and men who challenged him, men who were gentle or brusque, all to sate his curiosity and ego, which in his younger days encouraged Tirian to be attracted to people’s attraction to him, rather than to the people themselves.
It’s a little different with Peter. With every touch and taste, he becomes a little more malleable in Tirian’s hands. Less a legend and collection of stories, and more a man who, like Tirian, is fighting for his home. Tirian may be uneasy with walking myths, but he knows how to make a man moan with his mouth and hands, how hard to suck and how lightly to lick.
“Tirian,” says Peter raggedly, and the sound is exhilarating. Tirian has never heard him say his name like that before, all overcome and out of breath.
He finds that Peter’s hands are just as clever as his own, and Peter’s mouth just as warm.
When Peter reaches for something in a corner beside the fireplace and returns with a small bottle of oil in his hand, Tirian wonders if he has just found out a little too much about the Pevensies. (Don’t be silly, Tirian tells himself. There are a hundred things the oil could be for.)
“Turn around,” Peter orders.
“Turn around?”
He shrugs and pours oil into his palm. “Or stay as you are, I don’t much care.”
Peter pushes in slowly, breathes in slow and shaking. Tirian groans from the back of his throat – it’s been so long since the last time. He curses into Tirian’s neck in three different languages and bites, and Tirian swallows his cry, makes a strangled noise.
“Don’t let me get the best of you, your highness,” says Peter.
Then, sweat-slicked bodies slipping against each other, they fall into an irregular rhythm. Slow then fast then slow: a build-up of heat and friction until Tirian expends more energy trying to retain it than to let it go.
When Tirian comes, he stifles his moans. When Peter comes, he slumps forward, cursing by gods from five pantheons and, for a few disorienting seconds, Tirian is aware only of the taste of sweat, the weight of Peter’s body, his harsh breathing in Tirian’s ear.
+
“Looking forward to going home, Tirian?” asks Peter.
Tirian is pulling on his trousers, but the High King is still sprawled out naked and unconcerned.. “Of course,” says Tirian. He tries not to stare at him, but considering what they’ve just done, maybe it’s kind of a moot point. “On the one hand, I fear to see what the Calormenes have done to Cair Paravel, but on the other, it’s my home. I must go, especially if she is changing.”
“To defend her, or to be midwife to her next era, if it comes to it,” adds Peter, and Tirian chooses to ignore the grimness in his smile.
“So what would you say we are?” asks Tirian, slipping his shirt over his head. “Warrior or midwife?”
“It’s not my place to tell you that. Take it from a prophesied king: you’ll earn your fate with every fight that comes to you.”
“I have no prophecy to call my own, sire.”
Peter laughs. “Yes, well. I don’t know whether to envy or pity you there.” He sits up and gestures at his own body. “Look at this. My brother and sisters and I, we’re warriors and we always have been. Who knows, perhaps these scars have been written on our bodies long before we were even born, tucked away between the lines of that damned prophecy. Who knows how long we’ve been marked? People would ask me, ‘How did you get those scars, Peter?’ and maybe I should say, ‘They’ve always been there, every one.’” Peter looks up at Tirian, and the High King’s eyes are as unbending as the lives that have shaped him. “I am a warrior. I have no choice in this. It’s the only thing I’ve been allowed to keep.”
“Would you…” Tirian swallows. “Would you have chosen differently, then? Would you have chosen not to be a warrior?”
Peter looks away. “That’s not how destiny works, Tirian.”
Tirian leaves the High King to his thoughts and steps out into sunlight and cold air, his mind still spinning. Memories of Peter’s teeth on his neck jostle for space against questions about what comes next, whether Peter will seek him out again or if this is one of those affairs best left behind. None are lines of thought that can go anywhere right now, so Tirian does his best to put them aside. There is still much to do before leaving for Cair Paravel.
“Tirian!” someone calls out. Tirian looks up and sees Edmund approaching. “Just the man we’re looking for. We must talk disguises.”
“Disguises?”
Edmund clasps his shoulder. “Follow me.”
“Where are we going?”
“Tell me,” says Edmund as Tirian falls into step with him, “do you by any chance have a penchant for wearing make-up?”
“...What?” Tirian has a sinking feeling about this.
“Excellent.”
bedlamsbard's birthday, and this is for her. For you, you big crackwhore! It's a fic of a fic, specifically of her ongoing fic Dust in the Air, which is this crazy epic of fantasy worldbuilding, very disgruntled Pevensies, and (of course) 'Last Battle' revisionism. How do disclaimers work in this case? The characters are hers except when they're Lewis's, but the work is sort of mine except when they're hers. OR SOMETHING.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, O DELIGHT OF MINE EYES. <3333333333
Reflecting in a Watery Mirror
Narnia:Dustverse. Peter/Tirian. Rated R for kings getting it on. Thank you to the fabulous
zempasuchil for doing beta duty.A missing scene between chapter 6 and 7.
“I was still the same,
Knowing myself yet being someone other—
And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed
To compel the recognition they preceded.”
- T.S. Eliot, ‘Four Quartets: Little Gidding’
“I highly doubt that!” comes Lucy’s shrill voice. Whatever she says next is lost amid Peter’s protestations.
Tirian looks up from polishing his sword, and a she-centaur nearby flicks her tail as she considers the woods, the source of the shouting. Of the argument, Tirian can make out ‘traitor’, ‘Susan’, and ‘Aslan’ but the rest is unintelligible. A couple of minutes later, Lucy emerges from the tree-line, her eyes hard and her mouth set in a thin line.
“Your majesty,” Tirian greets her, and is ignored as she rushes past him.
Peter appears a few seconds later. Whatever anger Tirian had heard in his voice earlier, it is not writ on his face. The High King’s carriage is not one of peace, but neither is it one of being particularly put out, except perhaps for a sag in the shoulders. When Tirian greets him, Peter says, “Tell me, Tirian, do you have any siblings?”
“No, sire.”
“Well, consider yourself lucky.”
He hesitates. “Surely you don’t mean that, your majesty?”
“Mean what? Considering you lucky?” Peter contemplates this. “True, I suppose you haven’t been very lucky at all recently.”
“That’s… not exactly what I meant.”
The High King laughs. “I know what you meant, Tirian. Listen, I love my sisters and my brother with, if not all my heart, then with most of it. It’s just very inconvenient to love people who are so determined to hate each other.”
Tirian laughs with him, though it is a weaker laugh. The Narnians have been unsure what to make of King Edmund and Queen Susan’s recent reconciliation. On the one hand, this means less of Edmund and Susan pulling knives on each other at breakfast – always a good thing – but on the other hand, the reconciliation has made Queen Lucy increasingly peevish. Now she stands by herself against her siblings, and it puts Tirian in mind of how an animal can be twice as dangerous when it thinks itself cornered and alone.
Peter continues, “I’m sure you’re familiar with that problem, being king. Or former king. Or king-to-be, twice over, I don’t know. Once a king of Narnia, always, and beyond that I don’t keep track of the details.”
Tirian would expect to hear bitterness in his voice accompanying such words. Perhaps wistfulness, or resentment, but he hears only Peter’s typical confidence – acceptance, not submission. Tirian says, “What does that matter in the end, your majesty, for you are the High King of Narnia,” and the words feel uncomfortable on his tongue. If Peter needs no reassurance, then possibly Tirian is only trying to reassure himself. “You are king over all kings and maker of a golden age.”
“I am a man who loves my country,” Peter replies, “and sometimes that is all I know.”
And Tirian wants to say yes, he wants to say me too but, like before, he fears being presumptuous. He circumvents with, “An honorable man always does,” and feels silly about it, because how is it presumptuous to love one’s country? Tirian has spent the past many weeks observing the High King and his siblings, trying to divine some common ground between their reign and his. Now that he is finally relating to Peter, he feels only vaguely unsettled, unsure of how to pursue this potential intimacy, or whether he should at all.
So Tirian says, “Is Queen Lucy all right?”
“Of course. Lucy can take care of herself. I won’t envy anyone who crosses her, especially in her state. Then again, I can say the same of Susan. And that’s where things get sticky, I suppose.”
He nods. “Family will fight each other, but they will also fight for each other.”
Peter turns a gaze on him that is somehow perfectly crafted for making people regret whatever they just said. “I don’t need someone lecturing me on what my family will fight for,” he says coolly.
“Of course. Forgive me,” Tirian murmurs. “I don’t mean to overstep my boundaries.”
“Of course you don’t,” Peter snaps, and looks as if he might say something more, but then doesn’t.
Tirian turns his attention back to polishing his sword, his face heated. He is acutely aware that he and Peter are alone in this corner of the camp. Over the past few minutes, the other Narnians had drifted away from this place, found business to attend to elsewhere. The Pevensies - and especially Peter - still inspire fear and awe among them; the four sovereigns’ tendencies towards rash decisions, infighting, and efficient fearless killing have not helped in this matter. Most of the Narnians have developed the habit of giving the Pevensies a wide berth. The High King and his family may react with dismay and frustration at the averted eyes and self-abasement, but in the end, hundreds of years of mythology are difficult to escape.
“But I’ll concede to you this,” Peter continues, “and I don’t make concessions easily: this war is the only thing in six years that have brought my sisters to the same side of a fight. And, by the Seven, they’re still at odds.”
“One only has to look around our camp, your majesty, to see that the Calormenes have brought together many former enemies under a common cause,” says Tirian. “Old grudges put to bed to make space for new ones. One of the ironies of war, that it should bring people together as deftly as it takes them apart.”
“The ironies of war,” Peter echoes dryly, and again Tirian wishes he had kept his mouth shut. But instead of further rebuke, the High King just sighs and looks away. And just as Tirian is about to excuse himself, Peter says, in a softer tone, “We are coming together again, my siblings and I. It’s slow and painful and it won’t be the same – we aren’t the same – but…” He shrugs, and suddenly seems more boy than king. “But we never return to the same Narnia, so I suppose why should we return as the same Pevensies?”
“Your majesty?”
“But you have to figure,” Peter continues, “there has to be some unchanging element in Narnia, in ourselves. Something that makes us what we are, no matter what has been taken from us or how we’ve been divided.”
“Like what?”
“Our scars,” the High King replies. “Our scars are reclaiming us.”
Then, in a moment that has Tirian thinking (not for the first time) ‘your majesty, what on the blessed earth is going through your head’, Peter takes off his clothes from the waist up. Winter is not yet over, and although the days are warmer than they have been in recent months, the air is still chilly. One’s breath still mists at night. It’s far from shirtless weather, but Peter doesn’t seem to mind a bit. Instead, he shows his back to Tirian and says, “I’ve gotten these scars three times.”
He had pieced the Pevensies’ story through their arguments and idle chatter, and Peter fills in more blanks now. After fifteen years of ruling as prophesied monarchs, they stumbled back into their own world and became children again. “Every time we were returned to England, we were always returned in the state we left it in.” Like some gift of reincarnation and eternal youth that they never asked for. Tirian notices that Peter says ‘we were returned’ –not ‘we returned’ – like the kings and queens are books from a library, unable to keep their own stories for themselves. In England, Narnia existed only in their heads and hearts, in the stories they told each other. Narnia came to life in bursts of muscle memory, and in the familiar scars that flowered across their skin.
They always come back, Peter explains. Each one of these scars, like adults coming back to old childhood haunts and finding they still remember where the hidden paths are. He tells Tirian about wars against the Westron nations, about his time with the Red Company, about the Narnian Revolution from King Caspian X’s time, and about World War Two back in his own world, pointing out the corresponding scars. “People in England would ask me how I got them, and I have to take a second to make sure I don’t say ‘fighting the kraken,’ or ‘dueling a usurper to the throne’, although I wouldn’t be lying. Those are just a few of the many truths available to me. These,” he gestures to his scars, “are the shape of them. The only things to have stayed constant across two worlds.”
A breeze blows from the east that makes Tirian wrap his cloak tighter around himself, but Peter does nothing more than grit his teeth and hold out his left hand. “Soon,” says Peter, waggling his little finger, “this finger will be gone.”
Tirian sheathes his sword. “How do you think it will come off this time?”
“Haven’t a clue,” Peter shrugs, pulling his shirt back on, “but I look forward to finding out.”
He smiles. “I suppose if one knows how a story is going to end, what makes the story interesting is the telling of it.”
“The telling of it may be the interesting part, but it’s the ending that’s a comfort. Tell me, Tirian,” the High King says, “have you any scars?”
There is something in Peter’s eyes that is curious and calculating. Having been both a king and an ousted king, Tirian is used to people making snap judgments about him based on looks and hearsay. He feels no anxiety at being sized up, but being used to it doesn’t mean he likes it. Tirian has never liked feeling like he is being deliberated and probed for answers, like the way Peter is looking at him now.
He replies, “Yes. Yes, I do, I have some.”
Peter says, “Show me.”
Tirian can take it or leave it; he can say no out of propriety and how cold it is outside. Or, he can doff his shirt and see what happens next. Maybe the High King just wants to give Tirian grief by making him to stand shirtless in the cold. Tirian wouldn’t put that past him.
In the end, Tirian stands, props his sword against a nearby rock, and pulls off his clothes. He tenses against the cold, quietly commanding his body to not shiver overmuch.
Peter says, “Tell me about them, about your scars.”
Tirian points to where arrows have pierced him and swords have cut him, tells Peter about battles and tournaments, routs and skirmishes. (He leaves out the story of the gash at the small of his back. That one he got in his youth, making a drunken escape from the bedchamber of a patrician’s daughter in the Garden District. The story involves being chased by dogs, falling down the stairs, and – quite similarly to the present situation – not enough clothes, and Tirian would rather Peter not know about it.) The High King asks questions about the weaponry, and draws on intact knowledge from a thousand years ago to comment on the characters in Tirian’s stories. Tirian learns that the Anskettmen were a rough and practical people even in ancient times, and that the renowned Shoushani spirit of solidarity and industry is actually a more recent phenomenon.
“In my day, we used to say that three Shoushani men are enough to make six political parties,” says Peter.
It feels good to tell these stories, howsoever much Tirian wishes he were telling them fully-dressed. He hasn’t told these stories in ages. Who wants to listen to the stories of the disgraced king of Narnia? But Peter listens and, to his relief, there is no pity on the High King’s face, or at least none that he can detect. Peter’s half of the conversation is peppered with liberal criticism of Tirian’s sense of military strategy, which flusters Tirian but does not deter him. Tirian is reliving the past through its retelling, and the nostalgia is intoxicating.
It takes a shorter time for him to get to the tale of his most recent scar. His scars only have one story, after all. He touches a mesh of hardened skin where his neck curves into his shoulder and says, “This one brought me the closest to death.”
And Peter reaches out and touches it with easy casualness. Tirian swallows, looks away. He doesn’t know how to begin asking, “Do you know this? Do you know how to treasure memories no one else believes in anymore?” Tirian can’t find the words, doesn’t know his own motivation, but the High King’s touch is feather-light as he traces the shape of Tirian’s scar, the gentlest Tirian has ever seen the High King with someone outside of his family.
“That’s a sizeable one,” Peter murmurs, his thumb on Tirian’s jawline as his fingers lightly stroke the side of Tirian’s neck. “Not from a sword. A little too messy for a knife…”
Tirian has not been imprisoned and in hiding for so long that he has forgotten the royal manner of leaving things between the lines. That way, nothing ever has to be said and nothing ever has to be offered, and everyone can retain their pretensions. The world in which it is possible to communicate so much in few words and a few subtle gestures is a world of rigid boundaries – and who is more rigidly bound than the king? It is all coming back to him from just one touch lingering longer than it should, and Tirian takes a shaky breath and says, “It was a Calormene arrow, your majesty.”
The Calormenes’ dawn raid had caught his troops unaware. The arrow missed, but barely, sinking itself into the tree behind him. It had been close enough to rip out a considerable chunk of flesh. There was a lot of blood (and a lot of screaming, and a lot of death, and too many things happening all at once. Tirian remembers a few petrified seconds where he didn’t know whether he should call for help for himself or for the dying men around him).
“Were you frightened?” asks Peter.
Loyalty to the High King wins out over pride, and Tirian replies, “I was terrified.”
Peter nods, running his knuckles gently over Tirian’s ribs. It is an unwarranted familiarity and Tirian tries not to flinch, doesn’t know whether he should step away or let Peter continue to touch him.
The High King says, “You are all skin and bones, your highness.”
“Food is scarce, your majesty.”
“Yes.”
Peter trails his fingers up over his chest, skimming his throat, and lifts Tirian’s chin to look into his eyes. The High King’s gaze is steady and knowing, and when his hand alights on his cheek, Tirian shivers. Nothing truly offered, and nothing truly said.
“Cold, Tirian? I’m sorry, I just found your stories too fascinating,” says Peter, who doesn’t sound sorry at all. “Put on your clothes and come with me. I have wine back at my place. Let’s you and me escape this chill.”
Tirian hurriedly tugs on his clothes, although by now the clothes are as cold as the rock he laid them on. He grits his teeth to keep them from chattering. When he has tucked his sword into his belt loop, Peter raises his eyebrows, still waiting for an answer.
And Tirian can take it or leave it. He can decline and instead make his way over to the kitchen and scavenge leftovers from lunch. Or he can say yes to the wine, and see what happens next, which pretensions he’ll get to keep.
“Are you shy?” Peter asks. “Come now, we are both kings here, of a sort.”
“That’s gracious of you, your majesty,” says Tirian, and ventures a smile. “I would appreciate that, thank you.”
Peter cocks his head in the direction of his homewood tree, and they start walking.
+
The wine is beginning to pick up the taste of the leather it’s in, but it is still sweet and it does warm him. The fireplace helps too. He and Peter are sitting cross-legged on the floor before it, passing the wineskin between them like old friends. It gives Tirian an odd feeling to be here, to do this, and he enjoys it guardedly.
Tirian asks, “You sleep here with your brother?”
“I used to. He sleeps here with Lucy. I sleep with Susan upstairs, because Lucy won’t sleep with Susan.” He shrugs. “It’s warmer down here anyway.”
“Where are your siblings now?”
Peter smiles wryly. “I don’t know. I’m not their keeper.”
“But you are their High King.”
“I’m also their older brother, and they remember that before High King most of the time.”
It’s warm inside the homewood tree, and it turns out that a Peter with wine in him is a Peter who is easy with his affections: a hand on Tirian’s arm here, a brotherly shove there. They wend their way through a conversation riddled with historical anecdotes (or personal anecdotes, in Peter’s case) and camp gossip until Tirian finds himself being offered the last gulp of wine. There hadn’t been that much to begin with, but far be it from a well-bred king of Narnia to refuse hospitality from his host, or at least that’s what Tirian tells himself. Emboldened by wine and Peter’s current amiability, Tirian leans in close to enact the part of the story where the Galman soldier is conspiring with the priest. Peter turns his face so that their mouths are very close, which makes Tirian draw back slightly. The High King’s eyes are very blue, placid, and Tirian watches them as he divulges the secrets of a Galman noble house to an old priest who, as it turns out, is also a Natarene spy.
Nothing truly said nor offered.
Still, when Peter finally kisses him, Tirian’s heart pounds.
He freezes for a second or two before kissing back.
+
Between being ousted, imprisoned, and on the run, Tirian has not found the time for sex, and he finds himself submitting to Peter and reveling in the feel of so much warm skin pressed against him Likewise, Peter uses his teeth and isn’t afraid to bruise.
Tirian prefers women to men, but he has had his share of the latter. Men who bent to him and men who challenged him, men who were gentle or brusque, all to sate his curiosity and ego, which in his younger days encouraged Tirian to be attracted to people’s attraction to him, rather than to the people themselves.
It’s a little different with Peter. With every touch and taste, he becomes a little more malleable in Tirian’s hands. Less a legend and collection of stories, and more a man who, like Tirian, is fighting for his home. Tirian may be uneasy with walking myths, but he knows how to make a man moan with his mouth and hands, how hard to suck and how lightly to lick.
“Tirian,” says Peter raggedly, and the sound is exhilarating. Tirian has never heard him say his name like that before, all overcome and out of breath.
He finds that Peter’s hands are just as clever as his own, and Peter’s mouth just as warm.
When Peter reaches for something in a corner beside the fireplace and returns with a small bottle of oil in his hand, Tirian wonders if he has just found out a little too much about the Pevensies. (Don’t be silly, Tirian tells himself. There are a hundred things the oil could be for.)
“Turn around,” Peter orders.
“Turn around?”
He shrugs and pours oil into his palm. “Or stay as you are, I don’t much care.”
Peter pushes in slowly, breathes in slow and shaking. Tirian groans from the back of his throat – it’s been so long since the last time. He curses into Tirian’s neck in three different languages and bites, and Tirian swallows his cry, makes a strangled noise.
“Don’t let me get the best of you, your highness,” says Peter.
Then, sweat-slicked bodies slipping against each other, they fall into an irregular rhythm. Slow then fast then slow: a build-up of heat and friction until Tirian expends more energy trying to retain it than to let it go.
When Tirian comes, he stifles his moans. When Peter comes, he slumps forward, cursing by gods from five pantheons and, for a few disorienting seconds, Tirian is aware only of the taste of sweat, the weight of Peter’s body, his harsh breathing in Tirian’s ear.
+
“Looking forward to going home, Tirian?” asks Peter.
Tirian is pulling on his trousers, but the High King is still sprawled out naked and unconcerned.. “Of course,” says Tirian. He tries not to stare at him, but considering what they’ve just done, maybe it’s kind of a moot point. “On the one hand, I fear to see what the Calormenes have done to Cair Paravel, but on the other, it’s my home. I must go, especially if she is changing.”
“To defend her, or to be midwife to her next era, if it comes to it,” adds Peter, and Tirian chooses to ignore the grimness in his smile.
“So what would you say we are?” asks Tirian, slipping his shirt over his head. “Warrior or midwife?”
“It’s not my place to tell you that. Take it from a prophesied king: you’ll earn your fate with every fight that comes to you.”
“I have no prophecy to call my own, sire.”
Peter laughs. “Yes, well. I don’t know whether to envy or pity you there.” He sits up and gestures at his own body. “Look at this. My brother and sisters and I, we’re warriors and we always have been. Who knows, perhaps these scars have been written on our bodies long before we were even born, tucked away between the lines of that damned prophecy. Who knows how long we’ve been marked? People would ask me, ‘How did you get those scars, Peter?’ and maybe I should say, ‘They’ve always been there, every one.’” Peter looks up at Tirian, and the High King’s eyes are as unbending as the lives that have shaped him. “I am a warrior. I have no choice in this. It’s the only thing I’ve been allowed to keep.”
“Would you…” Tirian swallows. “Would you have chosen differently, then? Would you have chosen not to be a warrior?”
Peter looks away. “That’s not how destiny works, Tirian.”
Tirian leaves the High King to his thoughts and steps out into sunlight and cold air, his mind still spinning. Memories of Peter’s teeth on his neck jostle for space against questions about what comes next, whether Peter will seek him out again or if this is one of those affairs best left behind. None are lines of thought that can go anywhere right now, so Tirian does his best to put them aside. There is still much to do before leaving for Cair Paravel.
“Tirian!” someone calls out. Tirian looks up and sees Edmund approaching. “Just the man we’re looking for. We must talk disguises.”
“Disguises?”
Edmund clasps his shoulder. “Follow me.”
“Where are we going?”
“Tell me,” says Edmund as Tirian falls into step with him, “do you by any chance have a penchant for wearing make-up?”
“...What?” Tirian has a sinking feeling about this.
“Excellent.”
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*speechless* I just...just...OH MY GOD.
I think you know my characters (or, well, Lewis's) better than I do. Just, just, Peter's unease and the scars! oh my god! and Tirian, Tirian ohmygod, prince to king to man, and just! Just!
THIS IS FABULOUS AND YOU ARE FABULOUS. Thank you so much! I have to go pimp this all over my LJ immediately oh my god.
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originally i was gonna write tirian/edmund (ON YOUR KNEES KING OF NARNIA) but two pages in i realized peter would work better. and i couldn't help throwing in the bit about tirian's misspent youth 'cos that's just something we ought to hear more about. and i totally read "3 shoushani men 6 political parties" in 'the impossible country' and replaced croat with shoushani.
HOW CAN I NOT USE ELIOT. THIS IS YOU AFTER ALL.
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*flails wildly* THIS IS THE EXTENT OF MY COHERENCY. also, note the overuse of exclamation points!
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this is like feedback except so much better. (god, it's such a good thing my roommate is not here AGAIN; the wild grinning would be kind of hard to explain. and the flailing.)
dude, i had totally forgotten that peter has to get one of his fingers chopped off. and i have suddenly come up with the perfect scenario! well. not the scenario so much as the general reaction.
jill: oh my god...
eustace: is that a finger? is that peter's finger?
edmund and susan, looking at each other: well, we knew it had to happen sometime...
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i don't even remember anymore why i initially had tirian and edmund doing it in the woods, but it was when i wanted the pevensie to say "it's inconvenient to love those who are determined to hate each other" when i realized that peter, who is sort of a neutral party in the pevensie feud (more or less), is the better pevensie to write about. peter and tirian were still gonna do it all fast and dirty in the woods, but then you made that post about how it's still winter in Dust and susan wouldn't be wearing low-cut dresses, and i was like SHIT. but it works out, 'cos it's probably not so smart to be getting it on outside when there's a violent resistance going on.
there were def moments where i was like, "hmm, i wonder if she's thought of THIS" and then i felt gleeful about writing it. those parts were the narnians' reaction to the ed/su reconciliation and the subtle seduction of royal rigid boundaries. and i was kind of wondering whether you had forgotten about the lost pinkie.
i wanted to rip off more stuff from 'the impossible country', what with all the nationalism and territorial disputes and atrocities of war, but the ethnic joke was the only concrete thing i could fit in. heh. here's an interesting excerpt though: "I thought of the old adage that you could tell something about a nation by its vocabulary, Inuit having a dozen words for snow, Bedouin for sand, Meso-Americans for tubers, and so on. Serbo-Croatian had a disturbingly large number of words for butchering. One of them was kundacity, which meant 'to beat with the butt end of a rifle'."
during the writing, i was more aware of the differences between your peter and my peter, but when i reread it now, the differences are not so obvious. i mean, if i were writing the dust plot, the relationships would be quite different, but your universe gives me this opportunity to play around and contemplate. in the end, i write fic because i don't write meta. fic is how i think about these things.
tirian was kind of difficult to get a hold of in the beginning because you've characterized him as, like, this kind of spineless dude. but it was because of that that it was fun to think up his backstory, his motivations, and maybe how he's not so spineless after all. he was the king of narnia after all. he's had to deal with monarchs who are almost as crazy as this peter. the pevensies are overshadowing tirian, but i bet tirian has got a couple aces up his sleeve.
...so if tirian had this misspent youth, does he like stop being affectionate with jewel after A CERTAIN AGE? or are narnian unicorns just different. or is jewel just different.
anyway. ultimate outsider POV of the pevensies, you has it! any further questions, BIRTHDAY GIRRRL?
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you have given me things to think about with tirian! (actually, what's kind of interesting is that with peter in jail, we see tirian start to step up more in...um, it will probably be dust 13, because i really want 11 to be a peter pov, although they're more or less concurrent. i just want
peter in prisonthe contrast of the new cair paravel and the old cair paravel, and also the ghosts.) the thing with tirian, or at least what i think about when i'm writing (i have gone off on eustace and jill lately, so i might as well go off on tirian. and most people know how i feel about the pevensies, although there is totally stuff i could talk about when it comes to writing golden age pevensies (in different time periods, even!), post-lww pevensies, pc pevensies, post-pc pevensies, and lb-era pevensies, which is not exactly the same thing as dust pevensies) is that he tries and tries and it just hasn't been enough. maybe it would never have been, maybe it would have. but we don't know. writing tirian in dust is totally different than writing tirian during lb would be, just like writing eustace and jill in lb is different than in dust or sc.huh. speaking of which. no mention of eustace and jill? that was one of the things that struck me, if only because i'm always thinking about how they relate to tirian and how tirian relates to them after five years of cohabitation.
what i think is interesting is that you were talking about destiny, about the retaking of scars and how the pevensies are doomed to retell the same stories over and over. the destiny/fate concept (and they are not precisely the same thing, at least in my head) is one of the things that i always thought really separated dust from sing the sun, because sing the sun is about being destiny's bitch and dust is about kicking destiny in the face. except...not so much, because it's same song, different verse when it comes to all four of the pevensies coming back in dust. sing the sun is...a different destiny. a destiny of leaving rather than returning. i mean, dust and sing the sun both have similar themes, but they're not the same story. also, the fact that this song (http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/titanae/karmaslave.htm) is on my dust playlist is probably a clue. (for the record, in vague relation to the pevensies' role, is that this song (http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/afinefrenzy/lifesize.html) is also on my dust playlist.)
er. bear with my babbling here. i have a circular thought process, apparently. where was i...oh, yes, the destiny concept. are you seeing that in dust? *just curious*
on a completely non-related note, one of my faborite lines from the cut scenes of Dust 9 (http://bedlamsbard.livejournal.com/360650.html) is, "You're older than I expected." "I haven't heard that one before."
i love your outsider pov. i probably need to step back and look at dust as a whole at some point -- i've lost track of one of the threads i meant to carry through, which is how the pevensies are looked at by different groups of narnians, and gotten a little too focused on the pevensies themselves. (hell, in dust 10 i had to step back and remind myself there is a bigger plot than the crisis of the chapter. like, you know, THE WAR TO RETAKE NARNIA and how everything is supposed to support that.) seventy-four thousand words in, i suppose one occasionally gets tunnel vision? i'm concentrating too much on individual reactions rather than general reactions. damn. (although, if i remember by the time i get there, dust 13 should give us the exclamation "spring and summer!" which makes tirian blink because hey, he's actually met these people.)
okay, now i'm just babbling. FEEL FREE TO BABBLE BACK. or just, you know, tell me i'm crazy.
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oh yeah, eustace and jill. i just kinda forgot about them, whoops. i would've thrown them in maybe in tirian's war stories and in tirian's attempts to piece the pevensie story together. hmm, in retrospect i could've tugged something emotional out of jill being in tirian's war stories, and tirian remembering eustace's disparaging comments about his cousins but OH WELL TOO LATE.
i didn't see destiny in dust until i wrote this fic, and about the scars specifically. all i had going for this fic in the beginning was 'peter and tirian reminisce about the past and then have sex', but the themes and motifs kind of happened serendipitously. i know your pevensies are warriors, so i was drawing on that when i was writing about the scars, and in the end it worked out well enough. a) they are warriors, and b) their scars follow them; and then it comes down to picking the right conjunction between a and b-- 'therefore'? 'because'? 'if'? making mountains out of molehills, it's what i do.
now that i think about it though, i can see destiny in dust. maybe not at the forefront of things, though? my concept of destiny is touched upon in 'left hand of heaven', where it's all:
“Do you think I would be able to do this, to do all this, if it weren’t for the prophecy? How much of it is destiny, do you think, and how much of it is just me?”
“I don’t think you can separate destiny from this. It just fits and that’s the whole point, isn’t it? You are how you are, and that’s why you’re here. That’s why you’re doing what you do. Round peg into round hole, and stuff like that.”
destiny isn't about MAKING you do things. it's not a conscious will like that. it kind of piggybacks on free will, so you're not necessarily going out of your way to follow destiny -- you're doing what you would've done anyway. i may regret this metaphor but: kind of like... 'intelligent design', but with fate instead of evolution?
it's also kind of like, their destiny is who they are. but in a way, there would be no destiny if there were no pevensies. it hinges on them being who they are.
haha the tunnel vision is understandable. it's not just that you're writing dust, but that you've been writing in the same universe for half a year now. familiarity breeds... losing sight of things? forest for the trees. how DO these different groups of narnians react to the pevensies?
1/2 DON'T JUDGE ME
right, i see someone as tirian who is very idealistic and very rash, or at least he was very idealistic -- a lifetime of reading stories in which the good guys always win will get you that. plus young, relatively sheltered to an extent (though in a completely different way from caspian; i always end up comparing and contrasting caspian and tirian back and forth because, well, why not?), and never really prepared for this type of situation. but who could be, of course? you don't become king with the expectation that your country is going to be conquered and occupied and you're going to be forced into hiding. who does, after all? even caspian wasn't hiding from miraz for five years, and caspian is who tirian always falls back on; his situation was closest to tirian's. and, you know, getting your country conquered doesn't do much for your ego, especially when you are at least partly to fault, but hey! who could have foreseen the false god thing?
plus, of course, in dust so far tirian's pretty off-balance because HI. ancient king of legend suddenly on your doorstep! ancient king of legend with a prophecy to destroy the king who failed narnia! (you know. for another thread i forgot about. *beats head into desk*)
okay, looking back at some of the earliest chapters of dust, i will admit that i kind of shoved the destiny thing in the readers faces, what with tirian quoting the prophecy from lww.
although, also looking back, i did stop dropping narnian history all over the place when i started concentrating on the crisis of the moment, so that was a plus. THERE IS A HAPPY MEDIUM SOMEWHERE. *flaps hands*
i have very different concepts of fate and destiny, and they're not the same, but i'm not sure if i could really articulate them. i think what's at play in narnia, at least in my narnia stories, is less fate and destiny and more wyrd (http://www.wyrdwords.vispa.com/heathenry/whatwyrd.html), which is also similar but not the same. it allows for more agency, i think? and it has fewer negative connotations.
...i need to have eaten if i'm going to consider deep philosophical concepts like fate, destiny, and wyrd. (no. no, i have not eaten more than a handful of hershey's cocoa kisses yet. I FAIL. and i have been up since eight.)
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well, first one has to figure out who the different groups are. there are the arn abedin narnians, the fanatics like arnau who believe that just because they called the pevensies from narnia they can control what the pevensies do (yeah, like that goes over well -- this comes up in dust 10). then you have the other exile/refugee narnians, the ones in the camps -- those are the ones who are still loyal to tirian in varying degrees, the ones who won't submit to the calormenes, although of course they are also varying degrees of resigned. you have the narnians in the far north -- some of these actually haven't bowed the knee to cair paravel since caspian's time and have existed independent of regular narnia, but they're still loyal to the pevensies (also on the list of things that was supposed to show up several chapters ago). you've got the narnians who are living under calormene rule -- sure, they'd like to have narnia back, but it hasn't been so bad; the calormenes are actually pretty good at the whole ruling an empire thing, they've been doing it for thousands of years, after all. you've got a couple of different groups of narnians in the cities: the nobles that are being constrained by the calormenes, the businessmen, the criminals, all of whom have different motivations for anything they choose to do. you have the narnian traitors (or are they? looking back at the drughound) who have subimtted to the calormenes and work for them. then you move out of narnia and get the pirates, who are pissed off at the calormenes and do consider themselves narnians. the islands aren't really going to be a major issue. you got the people who worship aslan and the kings and queens of summer, you got the ones who have put aslan aside and worship just the kings and queens, you have the ones who worship aslan, you have the ones who worship other gods -- the red company still does the seven, there are people who worship the herdsman, the stormbringer (an ansketts god), some other gods. you have native narnians, you have telmarine narnians, you have narnian immigrants -- not too long ago narnia got an influx of shoushani immigrants.
...also, there's the fact that if i think about this too much i come to the conclusion that my head is probably going to explode. *facepalm*
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ooh, i like that tirian relates to caspian's situation. that just reinforces the idolization. i almost think that you don't need to follow up on the 'destruction of failed king' prophecy at this point, i almost feel like it's moot. though thinking about it again sends my mind in the following directions:
"it's no prophecy, tirian," says peter. "it's memories in a diary. it's words i said because i just saw my country almost destroy itself." and that makes peter think about his own prophecy, about how maybe they're just words taken out of context. (and if you're using your thing where ed wrote that prophecy during the whole kadreddin mirror debacle, then WOAH.) his whole life based on words taken out of context. is his life an accident, or can he say to himself that he is a man who has truly carved his own meaning and destiny?
"it isn't all just accident," lucy insists, and peter isn't surprised at the sentiment, relates to it too, even. because it would be nice if all the lives and deaths he's waded through meant something. but he won't be that surprised if nothing means anything. even an undoing is a way of going forward; you won't really go back.
"so if it all does mean nothing after all," says susan, "would that confirm your highest hopes or your worst fears?" because she has never shied away from asking difficult questions.
so wyrd is like this mix of chaos theory and determinism or something. also, i would love to see more narnian history, but you know how i am.
fasdhk COERCION THROUGH RELIGIOUS RITES yaaaay. what think you of a chapter, or maybe not even, where you kind of dump opinions of the pevensies from various factions into it. it can be kind of a multimedia reel. there can be campfire conversations ("but during the narnian revolution the kings and queens put caspian on the throne and then were done with it." wryly: "yes, but tirian's no caspian."), tavern conversation ("i heard the high king is seven feet tall and can turn you into stone just by looking at you!"), but also letters from politicians and the nobility ("i know we do not fear rumors, but i feel we must fear the prospect of violent resistance refueled by the fervor of religious fanaticism"), and various medieval equivalents of tabloids? town-criers and minstrels that tell dolled-up versions of the narnian attack on the supplies caravan in the roseroad, transcriptions of the lyrics of these songs. the drughound telling his friends about it ("pah. look in the asylums and you'll see dozens of people who claim to be the high king come back to save the land."). AND THEN, at the end of this chapter or something, a newspaper article (are there newspapers??) about peter being thrown in jail, and wanted posters for his siblings.
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curiously, the narnian history starts to fade away at the same time the action starts to kick in, although to be fair, that's where we get a lot of the pevensie povs, so it's not going to come up as much. but! now that tirian is two steps away from being back in Society (we shall see the garden district, i think. crap, did i cut the bit where tirian says he still has informants in cair paravel or not?), we shall probably see more of it. and peter is going to hear some mighty interesting things. (he's going to end up in three places i know of in his next pov chapter: jail, the castle of cair paravel, and the nameless island/the ruins of cair paravel. unless i suddenly decide to change something, of course.)
all prophecies are self-fulfilling prophecies, i think: what happens happens because they were heard. you don't do something and then a week later find out there was a prophecy about it; it's like the psychics who said they saw the titanic sink before it did, after the titanic sank. it doesn't matter if it's a "real" prophecy or not, after all. what matters is what you do with it.
GOSH I WANT IT. except i'm not really sure if it fits. *scowls* i mean, it does -- but i don't know how to work it in except dropping an interlude chapter, and i'm not sure if i can do that. man, i need someone who can look at the whole mass of dust as a whole so far and tell me what the hell i'm doing. that or i need to do this (http://synecdochic.livejournal.com/292838.html), and trust me, i am considering it. 's just that i have to read 130 pages of the victorian world picture by 8:30 tomorrow morning.
*grits teeth* i really, really need to step back from dust and look at it as a whole. as soon as i finish dust 10, i suppose, and i still have one more fight scene. (the, you know, second one in the chapter. it's only half as ridiculous as it sounds, and the second one has symbolism, which OHMYGOD i have to figure out a way to explain. well, not symbolism so much. narnia and its WALKING TREES. damn you lewis, and you too, adamson, while i'm at it.) dust 10: the chapter where i rip off stirling! to make up for dust 7, the chapter where i ripped off lynch! and then there is the part where i'm just ripping off lewis PERIOD.
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i don't remember if you cut it, but i don't think it matters much if you did. i don't think we'd be surprised that he still has contacts there.
yes an interlude chapter, that's what i meant to say! i just didn't know what to call it. an interlude chapter! what do you mean you can't do that?
this is what i'm getting from dust as far as main themes go: it's about reconciliation (between family, between the past and present), and letting go of the past, and how inextricable these two things are from each other. but i mean, you already know that, and we've discussed the latter at much length and into the ground (and it still never fails to break my heart).
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what's weird about eustace and jill is that there's a five year gap between sc and lb. how 'bout that for screwed up, huh? at least the pevensies were given the closure that they wouldn't go back, but eustace and jill are, at the point of lb, Pretty Damn Old. (but don't make me do math again. we all know how that went the last three times i tried it.)
flow? because i can break the arn abedin arc after 10, but the cair paravel one is going to carry on for two or three chapters more, and i don't think it's in a spot where i can easily interrupt it; peter, tirian, and eustace are in too much peril. i can break it after they get back to arn abedin -- well, after they mmpphmmsomethingsomething (not like that) -- but that's way past the arn abedin mini-arc.
yes. and -- shit, this is one of the things that isn't coming through because i saw the pretty pretty trees -- the power of faith and unity and coming together (esp. among the narnians, but amidst the pevensies, tirian, and eustace and jill, too). sacrifice/paying prices. and myth v. reality, of course.
and today in my classical studies class, we talked about FIC. well, not really, but i swear to god that's what it sounded like the prof was talking about. what happens when you leave myth behind? indeed.
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i don't know if i fear or look forward to an in-class discussion about fic in class. on one hand, i'll have a lot to say. on the other, i'll... have a lot to say.
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i can think of where i could put it in -- only we wouldn't have an arn abedin pov for a couple of chapters. but balance, you know, balance is overrated. *muses* i'll see how it works.
i wish we were talking about fic. he was talking about how the ancient greeks and romans retold the same myths, or variations on the same myths, over and over again in countless different media, and how we don't really have anything like it today, and i was sitting in class going, "dude...if only you knew."
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i wish i can be around a five hundred years from now and ppl are studying arthurian legend and the most intact canon that they have is 'MERLIN'. AND THAT WILL BE THE ARTHURIANA THE FUTURE WILL KNOW. LOLOLOLOL. in vaguely related news, i am writing swordfighting!morgana fic, because i have decided that someone must.
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i remember to use the trees, but not the giants, despite the fact the giants show up, like, five times more in canon than the trees.
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Edmund, may you always be this hilarious. Peter, I'm not sure if you were more human or less in this, but don't ever change.
Also, Tirian wondering if he just found out too much about the Pevensies is priceless.
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whatever shall we do with them??
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There is such an undercurrent of sadness in this, but there is hope there too and I love that.
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Interesting!
I really think everyone and everything and anything is majorly attracted to Peter. Who wouldn't be? Its Peter, High King of all kings, beloved older brother, warrior king and all that.
This 'Dust' universe in incredibly intriguing and riveting. I say to you and Bedlambard, keep writing. I really like what you write.
Re: Interesting!
Hee, yeah, as much as I adore Narnia, I have a soft spot for Last Battle revisionism, 'cos wtf Last Battle seriously.
Re: Interesting!
We will never know why C.S. Lewis did that to Susan's character though. We can't ask him now, can we?