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DVD commentary: 'and sometimes you hear the silence speak' 2/2
Original fic: and sometimes you hear the silence speak (Narnia. Edmund, Susan, Jadis. Shades of Pevencest and Edmund/Jadis, but technically gen. PG13.)
Part 1 of DVD commentary
Occasionally, they ride into the desert together and race across the dunes. Edmund rides hard and fast and Susan matches his speed most of the time, but horseracing is hardly her favorite outdoor activity. He shoots her a wild grin over his shoulder, free in all this emptiness, and sees the grim determination writ on her face. Lucy would grin back, he thinks, and Peter would probably be in the lead anyway, throwing him smug grins.
“I win,” Edmund declares, still panting when Susan catches up with him. Her cheeks are flushed and her braid is loose, though Edmund knows he can’t be in any much better of a condition. They share a few seconds of quiet atop the dune, catching their breaths.
Susan says, “I let you win.”
“Of course you did.”
He takes the skin of water she offers him and expects the water to be warm, but it is as cool and fresh as if drawn from a Narnian brook, and doesn’t at all taste like leather.
“Do you like that?” Susan smiles, seeing his expression. “I used one of the charms to keep it cold.”
“I thought you were the one who said we don’t need magic for everything.” But he leaves it at that, because you cannot ask for anything better than cool water in the desert. He hands the skin back to Susan, who takes another drink. Edmund says, “Do you want to go another round?”
Her expression is wary. “What? Another race? {{{Fuck that shit, I'm out of here.}}}”
Tashbaan is small and far away, and Susan and her horse shrink into the distance as she makes her way to it at a leisurely trot. Edmund ambles his horse in a different direction, watching his sister until she disappears over the next dune, and then he flicks the reigns, clicks his tongue, and digs his heels into the horse’s sides. The horse neighs, rearing like the wild thing it has never been, and breaks into a gallop.
They run.
+
The tawny gold of the desert reminds him of the Lion.
{{{I love desert as metaphor. When I was googling inspiration for fic titles, I came across ’The Sacred Desert’ by David Jasper on Google Books and man, that is everything I am going for with the desert, right there in the introduction. The desert as a harsh judge and a constant mother, but a distant father. There’s no room for bullshit in deserts. Frivolity falls away, and you are judged for what you truly are. I recorded some nice quotes from it in this entry, which includes the Edmond Jabes quote that I eventually sculpted the title from.}}}
+
He is bent over her desk, quill moving furiously, when Susan’s hands alight on his shoulders. “Edmund.”
“Mmm.”
“It’s late, brother.”
“I know what time it is,” he says. “Don’t let me keep you from sleep if you wish it.”
“I’m not worried about my getting enough sleep, Ed.”
“You do worry about such a lot of things.”
Susan’s hands slide forward and she puts her weight on her elbows on his shoulders, and her fingers tangle in his hair. “Aren’t you tired? We discuss stabilizing the price of grains tomorrow and I’ll thank you to keep from yawning at our hosts more than you’ll want to already.”
He shakes his head, displacing her hands. “I’ll thank you not to tell me what’s best for me.”
“You know, you haven’t been sleeping much at all,” says Susan, frowning. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed. You are looking haggard, and there are circles under your eyes so hollow I wager I’ll hear an echo if I yell into them.”
“Don’t exaggerate, Su.”
“Don’t keep things from me, Ed,” she says firmly. “You were the one who asked me to come down here with you.”
He puts down his quill and turns to face her.
“And don’t you dare tell me it’s for my own good,” warns Susan. “I get enough of that from Peter.”
“Then,” he says, “I shan’t tell you anything at all.”
“Are you joking?”
“Of course not.” But Edmund grins cockily at her anyway.
Her jaws clench and there is a moment when he thinks Susan might fall to anger, but instead she says, “You frustrate me. You always have. And you know this, so you think I can’t tell when you’re troubled but I can.”
“Nothing troubles me,” says Edmund, “except the price stabilization of grains. And perhaps your nagging.”
“Go to your room, Edmund,” she snaps. “Get some sleep.”
He gathers his papers and his books, and when he goes to kiss his sister good night she steps away.
“Don’t frown so, Su,” he says. “It makes you look ugly.”
Edmund leaves.
{{{When I handwrote this part, Edmund and Susan were initially much angrier at each other, but it was all "GOD, YOU NEVER TELL ME ANYTHING" and "UGH, JUST GET OFF MY BACK" and it was kind of juvenile. So, I just trashed it and kind of left it hanging. It was one of the last things I wrote. I knew I wanted a 'Susan confronts Edmund about the insomnia' scene but I didn't know how to write it.}}}
Back in his room, Edmund conjures fire from the air with old words and a complicated gesture, and he practices until he can conjure it silently with a single wave. He transfigures his quill into a nightingale, which sings for him and eventually flies out the open window. (He leaves the windows open so he’ll be sure that when the air becomes chilly and he shivers from cold, it is only the fault of the desert night. {{{His desire for Jadis is beginning to creep even him out, even if she is quite fabulous.}}})
When morning comes, it finds him asleep at his desk surrounded by papers, the ink on them still drying. {{{My guess is that the grain talks didn't go extremely excellently.}}}
+
“Edmund,” Susan says softly, touching the bruise-like shadows under his eyes.
“Stop,” he says, and turns away.
{{{Possibly in this scene they are naked and in bed. Possibly.}}}
+
The White Witch laughs. “Truly? You think I’ve used a spell to appear to you in dreams? I don’t know which of us you flatter more, Edmund. Do you think I bring you prophecies?”
“You have never brought me anything but lies,” Edmund replies coolly. He hates the way she looks at him, the way her black eyes glitter.
“When I said you would be king, I did not lie,” she says. Her smile has become familiar to him again. Even in his waking hours surrounded by the heat and the gilt of the sun, he can close his eyes and see it: the shape of her lips and the possibilities they weave for him. The Witch says softly, in a voice full of promise, “Would you like to know what you have brought me, my king?”
Then, a curious thing happens {{{and good thing, 'cos I don't know how to answer her question}}}.
There is a sound like the rush of wings {{{In Neil Gaiman's 'Sandman', Death comes with the sound of wings, which I forgot about until![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bantha_fodder reminded me, back when I wrote in an ounce of prevention that the courtiers came to associate Edmund with the beat of wings. Basically, I'm plaguerizing my plaguerism.}}} and from somewhere behind Edmund an arrow is loosed, its fletchings as red as summer blossoms. The arrow buries itself deep in the Witch’s chest, and there is no blood from the wound. The Witch, her eyes wide and her pretty mouth parted, raises her hands to touch the arrow as if to ascertain that yes, it is real, it has pierced her. She utters no cry of pain, and the last thing Edmund hears before the Witch shatters into a hundred shards of ice is a ringing as resonant as bells, filling his being.
He wakes to find Susan pretending to be asleep in his bed, her arm around him. Her breathing is shallow, and her touch is light.
“Susan,” he says breathlessly. “Susan.” He ribs her hard. “I know you’re awake. What are you doing here?”
“...Bad dreams,” she mutters.
Edmund hesitates. “Yours, or mine?”
There is no answer.
“Did you use the spell to get into my dreams? Susan!” He throws off her arm.
“What?” she snaps.
“Did you magic yourself into my dream?” he demands.
A tell-tale pause before she says, “Of course not. Go back to sleep.”
{{{I have this vivid memory of handwriting this section up to here in the library, during a break from reading a book for a class I have long since dropped. How forever ago it was!}}}
He frowns at her in the dark. Susan has never been able to lie to her siblings. She can fool princes and noblemen and diplomats from far-distant isles, but she is laid bare before her brothers and sister {{{if you know what I mean}}}. In the end, Edmund lets her stay with him. When her arm slips around him again, he doesn’t push it away {{{if you know what I mean}}}. When he sleeps, he does not dream.
+
{{{In my mind, this next section is called ‘Edmund and Susan get high as shit’.}}}
The hookah coal is by now mostly ashes, and the room is gossamer-hazy with failed attempts at Calormene storytelling.
Susan has trouble inhaling correctly – “Take it into your lungs,” Edmund tells her, and she snaps, “But of course, where else would it go?” – and she never really quite masters it. She ends up burping smoke in a way that make both of them giggle, and it inspires Edmund to tell a story Tumnus told them once about a dragon, although his smoke-dragon ends up looking more like a giraffe.
“Maybe you should tell a story about a giraffe,” Susan suggests.
“Mmmm.” His head feels heavy, and he wants nothing more than to curl up on some Narnian hillside and listen to the pipe-songs of Fauns. “Those new to storytelling often believe that, just because they are the ones telling the story, they are the ones who have power over it.”
“How queer,” says Susan, staring at him with eyes that are half a world away. “Did your storyteller tell you that?”
“Every word.”
{{{This smoking scene originally went on for longer, with Susan unexpectedly having a knack for it and prattling on about the mechanics of storytelling until I accidentally got lost up my own butt in literary masturbation. So, I cut it and scattered the storytelling mechanics to various parts of the fic.}}}
In his room the next day, Edmund examines the tobacco. It is soaked with essence of honey, treated with cinnamon, jasmine, cardamom, and something called the seer’s leaf, which only grows in Calormen’s hot climate. “But just a touch of it,” said Shativa. “A touch of the seer’s leaf is all you need.”
You take the ink of the story into your lungs, you make it a part of you, and you will exhale a little bit of who you are. Most non-Calormene scholars tend to agree that the smoke and the story are just vessels for the leaf’s visions, but the Calormene know better: once you start to tell a story, it’s difficult to say what is a vessel of what. Causality, as the seer’s leaf will teach you, is trivial. All these things and more besides, Shativa tells him.
“The leaf smoke becomes a part of you,” Shativa had said, “and once it is, what does it matter how it became a part of you? For, listen, I will tell you a story about the age of the universe. Or at least, the age of a universe. There are several, you know.”
{{{So, seer’s leaf gets exported to the northern countries, originally as an ingredient in medicines, but it doesn't take long for it to be reborn as a recreational drug. People figure out ways to increase the leaf's potency. Eventually the Archenlandish mainstream picks up on seer's leaf and panics, imposes a tax on it, then bans it altogether, all amid a fanfare of anti-leaf propaganda. Minstrels, mummers, tutors, and priests are recruited to participate to a nation-wide movement that teach children that if you take even one puff of seer’s leaf, you will end up friendless, diseased, and/or killing your parents.
Despite the propaganda, the smuggling of seer’s leaf into the north becomes more lucrative. Advocacy groups for the legalization of seer’s leaf try to start educational campaigns, but they never really get anywhere and are never really taken that seriously. “Aslan sang everything into being from the goodness of his heart,” the advocates insist, “EVEN seer’s leaf.” On the other side of the spectrum, just as passionately: “To smoke seer’s leaf is to reject Aslan and to turn your back on his love.”
The Calormenes keep tabs on these developments with curiosity and mild bemusement. Why all this hubbub about the storytelling plant? Crazy northern barbarians. Then maybe Lune comes along and he tells the Tisroc, “Join us in our War On Seer’s Leaf! Let us ban this vile plant on both sides of our border and build healthy societies!” But the Tisroc is like, “Uh...” because the Calormene government is totally getting kickbacks from the leaf-smugglers and plus, he’s not going to ban something that’s been part of his culture for generations upon generations. Why should Calormen change its traditions because the kids in Archenland can’t control themselves? That’s just ridiculous... isn’t it?
“You want me to set up, um, another hookah?” Edmund said thickly.
“I think we’ve smoked enough for the day,” said Shativa. Her tone sounded amused, but Edmund wasn’t sure. “This will be short, your highness.” {{{I’m rather pleased with how Shativa turned out as an OC. She knows her shit. She knows what Edmund wants from her, and she knows how to play into it just enough to get a good time out of it too.}}}
Her story went like this: “In this other universe, in the beginning, all the universe was a single speck of matter. It is so small you would not be able to see it, and so heavy you would not be able to lift it. It is heavy with the world, you see, for it is the embryo from which all things would come. And then, perhaps suddenly, perhaps slowly (for there were no days or nights then, nor any sort of division of time, not yet), this single speck of matter burst apart. It exploded under its own gravity and it threw its parts outwards to wherever it found room to dance, space to breathe.
“It is with this explosion that the laws of that universe came to be. When a man of that world asks another, ‘How old are the bones of the world in which we live?’ he must realize that the theories and frameworks his people use to answer such questions have only been existence since the explosion itself. Before the explosion, the laws were different, and so were the names of shapes and the shapes of names. The manifestation of this new universe has rendered what came before obsolete. Indeed, there had been no concept of ‘before’, before. Do you see?”
{{{Her story is something my boyfriend told me (not verbatim) a few summers ago when he had been reading ‘A Brief History of Time’, and it has stuck with me. I remember sitting on his bed while he gesticulated wildly, carried away by the beauty of the idea. A couple of our conversations have made it into my fics, in some way.}}}
Normally Edmund has little patience for Calormene circumlocution, but he did smoke a lot this afternoon and he thinks he does see, in a way.
Shativa asked, “Are you familiar with our religion?”
Edmund replied, “I know of it.”
“I know that, in your Narnia, our Tash is portrayed as a heathen demon, antithesis to your lion god Aslan. You see him as a harbinger of destruction, and you despise our sacrifices to him.” She said, “Your majesty,” and stroked Edmund’s hair with a cool and gentle hand.
He rolled his head, letting her hand slide to his cheek. “Yes?”
“In destruction, there is rebirth, renewal.” Shativa leaned in close, the smile of a secret on her lips. “Through sacrifice, we coerce gods.”
{{{And then they had sex.
The idea of coercing gods through sacrifice is from Emile Durkheim’s ‘The Elementary Forms of Religious Life’, which I had to read for class this semester, and thematically just made me think of Narnia ALL THE TIME e.g. this post. I scribbled notes in the margin that were like ‘HIGH KING ANGST’ and ‘Susan, post-TLB’, because I really needed to be a bigger geek that badly.}}}
+
He never sees Susan in his dreams – only her arrows.
Still, it warms him to know she is there. Sometimes Edmund already has his sword or crossbow in hand as if in empathy, but when he comes to face Jadis, even though he can easily dispatch the Witch, he finds he never does. Her black eyes bore into his as she murmurs the words and endearments that are by now so familiar, and his arms become heavy and leaded. She does not fight her fate, nor does she flee. Edmund wonders if maybe, just as he has grown and learned over the years, the Witch has too. Perhaps they have both learned patience and how to temper their passions. He recognizes in her acquiescence the consideration between battles and wars.
{{{She is coercing him through sacrificing herself, which I only realized upon a rereading; I hadn't been thinking about it when I was writing it. But yeah, Jadis is manipulating Edmund through sacrifice, because she knows that ends are also beginnings and that destruction is rebirth, &c. I didn’t expect that to tie in so well, so hooray for things working out after the fact!
So, like, does this mean that Edmund is some kind of god to Jadis, if she’s still alive? Or maybe not god, but just something implacably distant? Or, if she’s dreams, then does it just reflect Edmund wanting to be her god?
A semester of sociological theory and this is what I use it for. I wanted to have Jadis do Foucault and say something like, "A soul is just a prison to the body," she says, and her smile is almost sweet, "and don't let that overgrown cat tell you differently." But I didn't know where I'd put it.
Between this and The Light of a Different Sun, you can tell I kind of enjoy making up religions and fake civilizations.}}}
Susan’s arrows find Jadis again and again but, even when Edmund remembers to turn around, he can never see his sister. He thinks maybe he can feel her in the last bright flashes of the Witch’s death – there is a warmth that surrounds him that he thinks may be Jadis as she burns; or maybe Susan in his dreams, her golden light rushing to envelope him; or perhaps Susan in his bed in real life, soft and steady and gentle as she ever is {{{if you know what I mean}}}.
“Why do you think you can do it?” Edmund asks into the darkness of his bedroom. “Why can you kill her and I can’t?”
Possibly Edmund and Susan had some sex before this conversation. Possibly.
He hasn’t ever mentioned Susan climbing into his dreams since that first time. Edmund acknowledges it implicitly, by letting her sleep in his bed as if they have always done so, by automatically reaching for her when he wakes {{{if you know what I mean}}}, by not rejecting her solace when she holds him closer in the middle of the night {{{if you know what I mean}}}.
Susan, one arm across his chest and her head tucked into the crook between his neck and shoulder, answers, “Because it isn’t my dream. We are so easily overwhelmed by our own dreams.”
“So you think she really is just a dream, then?” And when she doesn’t reply, Edmund says, “You shouldn’t have to do this, you know. I ought to—”
“You sound just like Peter when you say that,” she muses. {{{How many times has she mentioned Peter now? The Pevensies just can’t escape each other.}}} “It’s not a matter of ‘have to’. Just because you faced her alone the last time, doesn’t mean you have to always. We came for you eventually, and we will again. Look, you were the one who asked me down here. I don’t begrudge you holding me at arm’s length, but I do wish you’d stop acting so surprised whenever I take your side.”
He hesitates. Apology would be clumsy and denial insincere, and Edmund finds himself not knowing quite what to say. He tries, “Even so.” When this doesn’t feel like enough, he tries, in a lighter tone, “If you ever tell anyone I let you inside my head, I’ll have yours.”
Susan raises her head and brushes her lips against his cheek. “Yes,” she says softly, “we all have our prides to think about, don’t we?”
+
“Your sister loves you,” the Witch says absently.
“It’s not unusual for a sister to love her brother.”
“Such a pretty girl, and so diligent with her study of magic. I would that she had stumbled into Narnia first, that I had met her first. Susan and I would have had a bit of fun, I think, before I turned her into a pretty statue.” {{{Jadis is totally the jealous lover here, which in her case means being a catty bitch.}}}
He knows she only says it to anger him, and it angers him even more that it works. “She would not fall to you, Jadis,” Edmund retorts. “Her heart can withstand more than you think.” {{{animus_wyrmis said she noticed some Susan/Jadis, and she is not amiss. I am, like, a compulsive subtexter. If you see it, there is a likely chance I put it there on purpose.}}}
And she laughs. “Don’t talk to me of women’s hearts, boy. You do not even know your own.”
Then, the arrow is loosed.
“My little flown bird,” says the Witch, and Edmund hears the mourning in her voice. Her eyes never leave his, and she fingers the arrow as if it were a piece of jewelry around her neck. “Your sister’s aim is truer than she thinks.”
She crumbles into snowflakes and the winds scatter her to the four corners of the world. When Edmund lifts his hand to shield his eyes from the flurries, the snow alights on his skin and does not melt. He tastes sugar on his tongue, and he wakes up.
+
There are scrolls and charms spread across the floor of Susan’s bedroom, abandoned for the afternoon for the basket of fruit Farroukh sent up to her. Susan holds out another date and Edmund takes it with one bite.
“Tell me, Ed,” she says after she licks the sticky sweetness from her fingers. “What would you wish for, if you were Al Adzin?”
Edmund says, “What would you wish for?”
Susan rolls her eyes. “Don’t answer my question with another question.”
“Don’t answer my question with an order,” he answers without pause. {{{Why so evasive, Ed?}}}
She chuckles. “Oh, Ed,” she says, cheeks pink with a little too much wine. “Perhaps you and I are not so different.”
Edmund raises an eyebrow. “Do you think me so different from you? Perhaps to your mind I don’t bleed when I am cut, or that I secretly have seven toes.”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it,” she retorts, leaning into him, “and I know perfectly well how many toes you have.”
{{{And then they have sex.}}}
He leaves her rooms reassured: that he loves his sister, loves Narnia, and has never been afraid to do what must be done. In his room, Edmund reviews export restrictions and agricultural subsidies until sunset, which is when the palace becomes quiet and still. Sunrise and sunset are meditative times devoted to the worship of Tash.
As twilight crawls into the sky, Edmund leaves his rooms and makes his way to the eastern wing where the older collections of the Tisroc’s royal library are kept, the ones to which only the Tisroc and his right-hand men have access. A few nights ago, during a walk around the gardens, the grand vizier had described to Edmund how to cut his hand to slake the blood-thirst of the lock, told him where the traps are set and how they might be defused. Yet, at the end of it, the grand vizier could not remember for the life of him what he had been talking about for the past many minutes. {{{Originally, I had Edmund bribing a servant with some rubies to let him into the library, but WTF, you really gonna trust the security of the secret magic library to any old servant? That’s high-level shit. Also, it’s much cooler having Edmund magically mess with the grand vizier.}}}
“You were talking about the irrigation infrastructure in the southern reaches,” Edmund reminded him gently.
“Ah, yes,” the grand vizier had nodded, as if emerging from a fog. He blinked a few times, frowning, then looked at the young king and continued as if nothing had happened. “I fear there will be famine if we are not able to preempt another source of grain.”
“Might I suggest lowering tariffs on crops?” Edmund had replied.
The conversation went on as such as the two men made their way through the Tisroc’s fertile gardens, politicians politely negotiating the wealth of their nations. {{{Further trade negotiation hijinks ensue here. ...Sort of.}}}
In the library, the dusty shelves are heavy with books, each page crackling with the arcana of centuries.
Is she omen? Is she memory? Is she dreams? The White Witch dies each night and Susan’s arrows pierce where his resolve cannot. Edmund doubts he will find the answers to these questions in old books, but he is confident he will find something. He’s not the type to sit still and let things wash over him, after all, not anymore.
+
{{{My beta calls this next part ‘the date rape scene’.}}}
Ancient Calormene script looks like the crests of waves. Edmund paints protective runes on Susan's body with the enchanted ink he procured from Mama Biguda. (They're only partly protective runes, but he doesn't tell his sister what else they do.) He traces the words along Susan’s spine, over her heart, down the side of her neck: points of power. From her ankle to her soft belly, a long lyric invoking old gods. {{{I have suuuuuch a kink for writing and painting on bodies. SUCH A KINK. I want to write the fic where Susan paints protective runes on Peter's body the night before a battle and maybe they get a little distracted.}}}
“Edmund,” says Susan, a little tightly.
“Shh,” he murmurs, and writes around her wrists, writes along her clavicles.
The ink glows and sinks into her skin and is gone, and in the end there's no proof she's been subject to spells except for a flush in her cheeks and an unfocused look in her eyes. She reaches for Edmund and he lets his sister curl into him, dizzy with magic.
Her body burns with fever, though Edmund has anticipated this aftereffect. Susan clutches him shivering as they lie on her bed, mumbling about how cold she is into his neck, her lips heated and soft and her fingers tightly curled around his arms. Edmund reaches for the blankets with some difficulty – Susan keeps grabbing him when he moves away. He makes soothing noises and murmurs nothings at her as he adjusts the blankets around them.
“Edmund,” Susan breathes. “O my brother, what have you done to me?”
“Don’t you trust me, Su?” he asks softly. “I thought we’re to trust each other, you and I.”
Her skin is raw and sensitive with magic; he can tell from the way she mewls at every brush of the sheets on her skin and how she curves into his touch. Edmund kisses her face to soothe her and she lets herself be lulled by it, kissing him back disconnectedly. Her hands cup his face, slide down his neck and turn into fists clutching his shirt as she murmurs his name, sometimes like a question and sometimes like a plea, {{{possibly a plea for sexing up}}}. His sister unfurls in his arms, and he exerts only the gentlest pressure in holding her still, holding her close. Edmund makes no unexpected movements and speaks very slow, very soft, the way one would to a dangerous animal caught in a trap. There is nothing to fear, he is telling her. More importantly, there is nothing to fight.
{{{I have had so much fun writing about magic in this fic, with the making up spells and magical trinkets, Jadis's duplicity, and this sensual Edmund/Susan mindfuckery. I kind of like how the previous paragraph worked out: touch as manipulation, the power play of seduction, sensory overload.}}}
“You do know,” she says, “that I would never hurt you.”
Edmund says, “Nor I you.”
“You are my brother.”
“And you are my sister.”
“Do you understand, Edmund?” She lifts her head to look into his eyes. “She won’t have you again. I want to promise you this. I want you to accept my promise.”
Edmund is bound to Peter by allegiance and duty, and bound to Lucy by a tenderness borne of the fact that she was the victim of his first significant betrayal. His relationship with Susan, however, has always been more nebulous. Her tolerance for frippery tries his sensibilities, and they have never been the closest of the four. He is hit by a sudden fondness for her now, with her face unmasked and her blue eyes wide. {{{Edmund may relate to Susan’s strategic duplicitousness, but just because he relates to her, it doesn’t necessarily mean he prefers her company. In this universe, at least. I can understand if he’s had it up to HERE with duplicitous people, and prefers Lucy's artlessness and Peter's constant good intention to Susan's wheeling and dealing and diplomatic smiles. Susan can be his ally, but maybe not a bosom buddy? They are... too similar? Something. Though, I am intrigued by the premise of Edmund reaching out to lipstick&parties!Susan in England, because he knows what it's like to be alienated from your family and to be a traitor for it. He knows the value of being forgived, but possibly Susan lashes out like, "I don't need forgiveness, Ed. I've done nothing wrong." In some ways, it's easier to betray your family for the Witch, because at least a Witch can be cast out and killed. But what if you betray your family for the world? What would you vanquish then? Susan says, "You keep calling it that, what I'm doing, but it's not. It's not betrayal. Oh Ed, I'm not a traitor."}}} The magic has laid her open, and Edmund cannot help but feel a flash of guilt for pushing her to this state. But certain things, he has decided, must come to pass.
He says, “No witch will have me, with you and your bow by my side.”
“We should never have come to Calormen.” Susan curls up with her head resting on Edmund’s shoulder. “We should never have.”
“Come, Su, don’t be like that. This is for Narnia. Aslan wants his country to be strong and prepared for anything.”
They are quiet again, waiting for Susan’s breathing to fall back to even. When she eventually speaks, struggling against the fever, there is a clarity in her voice that wasn’t there before. “Tell me what you’ve done to me, Edmund.”
“The spell protects one from possessions.”
“That’s not all it does. I feel it.”
“No doubt you’re feeling a lot of things right now, Su. You ought to just relax.”
“We should cast it on you too.”
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“Then how does it work?” she demands.
“You needn’t concern yourself with that.”
Susan clutches his shirt and although he does not look at her face, he can imagine her angered expression from the way she tenses her body. “Do not talk to me as if I were a child!”
“Sorry,” he says softly. “I know you’re not.” {{{Whatevs, he's apologizing 'cos he knows it won’t mean shit in the end anyway. He’s got Susan where he wants her.In bed, naked, fucked up, and turned on.}}}
“Edmund, tell me.”
“I’ll tell you later,” he promises, and kisses her forehead and strokes her hair, and never does.
{{{And then they have sex.
I totally planned a different ending for this scene, in which Susan asks Edmund to tell her a story and Edmund tells her a highly symbolic story that ties back to the aforementioned storytelling mechanics and his downward spiral to Jadis. I couldn't think of a tight enough story, though! I started scribbling one about a noble and handsome Calormene general named Aminzade the Elder, but it never went anywhere. Incidentally, Aminzade is also the name of the sky-ship captain that Edmund and Susan go with in the Narnia/Stardust AU of Last Battle revisionism. Aminzade was the last name of the guy who authored my sociology readings that week. I mean, Aminzade, what a badass name.}}}
+
“Edmund!”
Susan is shaking him violently from sleep and he blinks to consciousness with the morning sun and his sister’s fury in his eyes. “What did you do?” she demands.
“Susan–” he says, rubbing his eyes, but the words tumble from her mouth like a flood.
“I can’t go into your dreams anymore. I couldn’t find you. I couldn’t find a way in. I could feel you and the winter and I couldn’t find a way in! What did you do?”
Susan’s fingers clench bruises into his skin, and attempts to wriggle out of her grasp are unsuccessful. She has always been able to hold Edmund down if she wants to, though in recent years, as he grew in height and his arms filled out, this has been increasingly due to Edmund’s submission than her strength {{{if you know what I mean}}}. It is one of the things he has learned from her: to let oneself be conquered as future investment, power through calculated assent.
He says to her, “Susan, calm yourself.”
“Don’t you dare!” she rages. “Don’t you dare tell me what to do, Edmund. What magic have you done to me? Or on yourself, or on what, I don’t know. You said it was a spell of protection!”
“I wasn’t lying,” he says quietly.
“What is it protecting me from?” she demands.
“It doesn’t just protect you.”
Her eyes narrow. “Undo this spell.”
“No.”
“Edmund.”
“Susan.” He raises his hand to stroke her cheek and she swats at it, rearing a little. Edmund takes the opportunity to surge up at her, catch her body in his arms and flip them over, trapping Susan between himself and the bed. {{{It's like, how many times can I put them in sexually charged positions and still claim it's gen? On the one hand, it's a pretty fun game, but on the other hand, sometimes a cigar is just be a cigar and should just be a cigar?}}}
“Get off me,” she hisses.
“Susan, it’s not your battle to fight. It never has been.”
“Get off me!”
He does. “I’m sorry. I never should’ve let this go on for as long as it has. Don’t waste your time on other people’s dreams, Su – nothing good comes of it. Besides, it wasn’t you she had, it was me.” And now she’s mine, he thinks. “She’s just dreams, after all. It’s just dreams.”
“It’s clearly not just dreams!”
“How are you so sure?”
She brushes her hair from her face and breathes deeply the way she does when trying to rein in her temper. Looks away, and has no answer. “You don’t have to do this alone.”
“Some fights are necessarily fought alone – you’ll learn this someday.”
Susan glares at him. “Don’t take that tone with me.” {{{She likes to give it, but doesn’t like to receive it.}}}
Edmund rolls his eyes.
He listens to her entreaties and accusations as she dresses herself, clumsy with frustration, but he is used to such displays of passion, and is unmoved. Edmund flops in an armchair and eats an apple, letting her anger pass through him. {{{I think I should have had him eating a different fruit. Apples are so fraught with symbolism, and here I just wanted him to display nonchalance through the careless eating of fruit.}}}
Susan doesn’t share his bed with him that night. Edmund is relieved, a little, but he tosses and turns, stretches out on a bed that suddenly feels too big for him.
When he dreams, Jadis smiles in wild delight and offers him her hand.
{{{I got into a discussion withwestingturtle about what would have happened after Edmund and Susan returned to Narnia post-fic. This is what I wrote: I would on second thought maybe take the less creepy route and make it about redemption or something. Lucy would notice Edmund being out of sorts, because Edmund was right when he said she would just try to stop him, because she knows her brother and his weaknesses. Well, they all do, but Peter has High King-ing to do and Susan has already tried and tried to reach out to Edmund since he barred her from his dreams, and things have been a little tense between them since then understandably. Lucy does less of shaking her finger and going, "You shouldn't have done that," and more of just trying to coax him out of his emo, tease him and race with him, and stay up with him if necessary, and basically love him back to himself. Lucy, at her most valiant, and her faith in the world.}}}
End of my first commentary! What do you guys think?
Part 1 of DVD commentary
Occasionally, they ride into the desert together and race across the dunes. Edmund rides hard and fast and Susan matches his speed most of the time, but horseracing is hardly her favorite outdoor activity. He shoots her a wild grin over his shoulder, free in all this emptiness, and sees the grim determination writ on her face. Lucy would grin back, he thinks, and Peter would probably be in the lead anyway, throwing him smug grins.
“I win,” Edmund declares, still panting when Susan catches up with him. Her cheeks are flushed and her braid is loose, though Edmund knows he can’t be in any much better of a condition. They share a few seconds of quiet atop the dune, catching their breaths.
Susan says, “I let you win.”
“Of course you did.”
He takes the skin of water she offers him and expects the water to be warm, but it is as cool and fresh as if drawn from a Narnian brook, and doesn’t at all taste like leather.
“Do you like that?” Susan smiles, seeing his expression. “I used one of the charms to keep it cold.”
“I thought you were the one who said we don’t need magic for everything.” But he leaves it at that, because you cannot ask for anything better than cool water in the desert. He hands the skin back to Susan, who takes another drink. Edmund says, “Do you want to go another round?”
Her expression is wary. “What? Another race? {{{Fuck that shit, I'm out of here.}}}”
Tashbaan is small and far away, and Susan and her horse shrink into the distance as she makes her way to it at a leisurely trot. Edmund ambles his horse in a different direction, watching his sister until she disappears over the next dune, and then he flicks the reigns, clicks his tongue, and digs his heels into the horse’s sides. The horse neighs, rearing like the wild thing it has never been, and breaks into a gallop.
They run.
+
The tawny gold of the desert reminds him of the Lion.
{{{I love desert as metaphor. When I was googling inspiration for fic titles, I came across ’The Sacred Desert’ by David Jasper on Google Books and man, that is everything I am going for with the desert, right there in the introduction. The desert as a harsh judge and a constant mother, but a distant father. There’s no room for bullshit in deserts. Frivolity falls away, and you are judged for what you truly are. I recorded some nice quotes from it in this entry, which includes the Edmond Jabes quote that I eventually sculpted the title from.}}}
+
He is bent over her desk, quill moving furiously, when Susan’s hands alight on his shoulders. “Edmund.”
“Mmm.”
“It’s late, brother.”
“I know what time it is,” he says. “Don’t let me keep you from sleep if you wish it.”
“I’m not worried about my getting enough sleep, Ed.”
“You do worry about such a lot of things.”
Susan’s hands slide forward and she puts her weight on her elbows on his shoulders, and her fingers tangle in his hair. “Aren’t you tired? We discuss stabilizing the price of grains tomorrow and I’ll thank you to keep from yawning at our hosts more than you’ll want to already.”
He shakes his head, displacing her hands. “I’ll thank you not to tell me what’s best for me.”
“You know, you haven’t been sleeping much at all,” says Susan, frowning. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed. You are looking haggard, and there are circles under your eyes so hollow I wager I’ll hear an echo if I yell into them.”
“Don’t exaggerate, Su.”
“Don’t keep things from me, Ed,” she says firmly. “You were the one who asked me to come down here with you.”
He puts down his quill and turns to face her.
“And don’t you dare tell me it’s for my own good,” warns Susan. “I get enough of that from Peter.”
“Then,” he says, “I shan’t tell you anything at all.”
“Are you joking?”
“Of course not.” But Edmund grins cockily at her anyway.
Her jaws clench and there is a moment when he thinks Susan might fall to anger, but instead she says, “You frustrate me. You always have. And you know this, so you think I can’t tell when you’re troubled but I can.”
“Nothing troubles me,” says Edmund, “except the price stabilization of grains. And perhaps your nagging.”
“Go to your room, Edmund,” she snaps. “Get some sleep.”
He gathers his papers and his books, and when he goes to kiss his sister good night she steps away.
“Don’t frown so, Su,” he says. “It makes you look ugly.”
Edmund leaves.
{{{When I handwrote this part, Edmund and Susan were initially much angrier at each other, but it was all "GOD, YOU NEVER TELL ME ANYTHING" and "UGH, JUST GET OFF MY BACK" and it was kind of juvenile. So, I just trashed it and kind of left it hanging. It was one of the last things I wrote. I knew I wanted a 'Susan confronts Edmund about the insomnia' scene but I didn't know how to write it.}}}
Back in his room, Edmund conjures fire from the air with old words and a complicated gesture, and he practices until he can conjure it silently with a single wave. He transfigures his quill into a nightingale, which sings for him and eventually flies out the open window. (He leaves the windows open so he’ll be sure that when the air becomes chilly and he shivers from cold, it is only the fault of the desert night. {{{His desire for Jadis is beginning to creep even him out, even if she is quite fabulous.}}})
When morning comes, it finds him asleep at his desk surrounded by papers, the ink on them still drying. {{{My guess is that the grain talks didn't go extremely excellently.}}}
+
“Edmund,” Susan says softly, touching the bruise-like shadows under his eyes.
“Stop,” he says, and turns away.
{{{Possibly in this scene they are naked and in bed. Possibly.}}}
+
The White Witch laughs. “Truly? You think I’ve used a spell to appear to you in dreams? I don’t know which of us you flatter more, Edmund. Do you think I bring you prophecies?”
“You have never brought me anything but lies,” Edmund replies coolly. He hates the way she looks at him, the way her black eyes glitter.
“When I said you would be king, I did not lie,” she says. Her smile has become familiar to him again. Even in his waking hours surrounded by the heat and the gilt of the sun, he can close his eyes and see it: the shape of her lips and the possibilities they weave for him. The Witch says softly, in a voice full of promise, “Would you like to know what you have brought me, my king?”
Then, a curious thing happens {{{and good thing, 'cos I don't know how to answer her question}}}.
There is a sound like the rush of wings {{{In Neil Gaiman's 'Sandman', Death comes with the sound of wings, which I forgot about until
bantha_fodder reminded me, back when I wrote in an ounce of prevention that the courtiers came to associate Edmund with the beat of wings. Basically, I'm plaguerizing my plaguerism.}}} and from somewhere behind Edmund an arrow is loosed, its fletchings as red as summer blossoms. The arrow buries itself deep in the Witch’s chest, and there is no blood from the wound. The Witch, her eyes wide and her pretty mouth parted, raises her hands to touch the arrow as if to ascertain that yes, it is real, it has pierced her. She utters no cry of pain, and the last thing Edmund hears before the Witch shatters into a hundred shards of ice is a ringing as resonant as bells, filling his being. He wakes to find Susan pretending to be asleep in his bed, her arm around him. Her breathing is shallow, and her touch is light.
“Susan,” he says breathlessly. “Susan.” He ribs her hard. “I know you’re awake. What are you doing here?”
“...Bad dreams,” she mutters.
Edmund hesitates. “Yours, or mine?”
There is no answer.
“Did you use the spell to get into my dreams? Susan!” He throws off her arm.
“What?” she snaps.
“Did you magic yourself into my dream?” he demands.
A tell-tale pause before she says, “Of course not. Go back to sleep.”
{{{I have this vivid memory of handwriting this section up to here in the library, during a break from reading a book for a class I have long since dropped. How forever ago it was!}}}
He frowns at her in the dark. Susan has never been able to lie to her siblings. She can fool princes and noblemen and diplomats from far-distant isles, but she is laid bare before her brothers and sister {{{if you know what I mean}}}. In the end, Edmund lets her stay with him. When her arm slips around him again, he doesn’t push it away {{{if you know what I mean}}}. When he sleeps, he does not dream.
+
{{{In my mind, this next section is called ‘Edmund and Susan get high as shit’.}}}
The hookah coal is by now mostly ashes, and the room is gossamer-hazy with failed attempts at Calormene storytelling.
Susan has trouble inhaling correctly – “Take it into your lungs,” Edmund tells her, and she snaps, “But of course, where else would it go?” – and she never really quite masters it. She ends up burping smoke in a way that make both of them giggle, and it inspires Edmund to tell a story Tumnus told them once about a dragon, although his smoke-dragon ends up looking more like a giraffe.
“Maybe you should tell a story about a giraffe,” Susan suggests.
“Mmmm.” His head feels heavy, and he wants nothing more than to curl up on some Narnian hillside and listen to the pipe-songs of Fauns. “Those new to storytelling often believe that, just because they are the ones telling the story, they are the ones who have power over it.”
“How queer,” says Susan, staring at him with eyes that are half a world away. “Did your storyteller tell you that?”
“Every word.”
{{{This smoking scene originally went on for longer, with Susan unexpectedly having a knack for it and prattling on about the mechanics of storytelling until I accidentally got lost up my own butt in literary masturbation. So, I cut it and scattered the storytelling mechanics to various parts of the fic.}}}
In his room the next day, Edmund examines the tobacco. It is soaked with essence of honey, treated with cinnamon, jasmine, cardamom, and something called the seer’s leaf, which only grows in Calormen’s hot climate. “But just a touch of it,” said Shativa. “A touch of the seer’s leaf is all you need.”
You take the ink of the story into your lungs, you make it a part of you, and you will exhale a little bit of who you are. Most non-Calormene scholars tend to agree that the smoke and the story are just vessels for the leaf’s visions, but the Calormene know better: once you start to tell a story, it’s difficult to say what is a vessel of what. Causality, as the seer’s leaf will teach you, is trivial. All these things and more besides, Shativa tells him.
“The leaf smoke becomes a part of you,” Shativa had said, “and once it is, what does it matter how it became a part of you? For, listen, I will tell you a story about the age of the universe. Or at least, the age of a universe. There are several, you know.”
{{{So, seer’s leaf gets exported to the northern countries, originally as an ingredient in medicines, but it doesn't take long for it to be reborn as a recreational drug. People figure out ways to increase the leaf's potency. Eventually the Archenlandish mainstream picks up on seer's leaf and panics, imposes a tax on it, then bans it altogether, all amid a fanfare of anti-leaf propaganda. Minstrels, mummers, tutors, and priests are recruited to participate to a nation-wide movement that teach children that if you take even one puff of seer’s leaf, you will end up friendless, diseased, and/or killing your parents.
Despite the propaganda, the smuggling of seer’s leaf into the north becomes more lucrative. Advocacy groups for the legalization of seer’s leaf try to start educational campaigns, but they never really get anywhere and are never really taken that seriously. “Aslan sang everything into being from the goodness of his heart,” the advocates insist, “EVEN seer’s leaf.” On the other side of the spectrum, just as passionately: “To smoke seer’s leaf is to reject Aslan and to turn your back on his love.”
The Calormenes keep tabs on these developments with curiosity and mild bemusement. Why all this hubbub about the storytelling plant? Crazy northern barbarians. Then maybe Lune comes along and he tells the Tisroc, “Join us in our War On Seer’s Leaf! Let us ban this vile plant on both sides of our border and build healthy societies!” But the Tisroc is like, “Uh...” because the Calormene government is totally getting kickbacks from the leaf-smugglers and plus, he’s not going to ban something that’s been part of his culture for generations upon generations. Why should Calormen change its traditions because the kids in Archenland can’t control themselves? That’s just ridiculous... isn’t it?
“You want me to set up, um, another hookah?” Edmund said thickly.
“I think we’ve smoked enough for the day,” said Shativa. Her tone sounded amused, but Edmund wasn’t sure. “This will be short, your highness.” {{{I’m rather pleased with how Shativa turned out as an OC. She knows her shit. She knows what Edmund wants from her, and she knows how to play into it just enough to get a good time out of it too.}}}
Her story went like this: “In this other universe, in the beginning, all the universe was a single speck of matter. It is so small you would not be able to see it, and so heavy you would not be able to lift it. It is heavy with the world, you see, for it is the embryo from which all things would come. And then, perhaps suddenly, perhaps slowly (for there were no days or nights then, nor any sort of division of time, not yet), this single speck of matter burst apart. It exploded under its own gravity and it threw its parts outwards to wherever it found room to dance, space to breathe.
“It is with this explosion that the laws of that universe came to be. When a man of that world asks another, ‘How old are the bones of the world in which we live?’ he must realize that the theories and frameworks his people use to answer such questions have only been existence since the explosion itself. Before the explosion, the laws were different, and so were the names of shapes and the shapes of names. The manifestation of this new universe has rendered what came before obsolete. Indeed, there had been no concept of ‘before’, before. Do you see?”
{{{Her story is something my boyfriend told me (not verbatim) a few summers ago when he had been reading ‘A Brief History of Time’, and it has stuck with me. I remember sitting on his bed while he gesticulated wildly, carried away by the beauty of the idea. A couple of our conversations have made it into my fics, in some way.}}}
Normally Edmund has little patience for Calormene circumlocution, but he did smoke a lot this afternoon and he thinks he does see, in a way.
Shativa asked, “Are you familiar with our religion?”
Edmund replied, “I know of it.”
“I know that, in your Narnia, our Tash is portrayed as a heathen demon, antithesis to your lion god Aslan. You see him as a harbinger of destruction, and you despise our sacrifices to him.” She said, “Your majesty,” and stroked Edmund’s hair with a cool and gentle hand.
He rolled his head, letting her hand slide to his cheek. “Yes?”
“In destruction, there is rebirth, renewal.” Shativa leaned in close, the smile of a secret on her lips. “Through sacrifice, we coerce gods.”
{{{And then they had sex.
The idea of coercing gods through sacrifice is from Emile Durkheim’s ‘The Elementary Forms of Religious Life’, which I had to read for class this semester, and thematically just made me think of Narnia ALL THE TIME e.g. this post. I scribbled notes in the margin that were like ‘HIGH KING ANGST’ and ‘Susan, post-TLB’, because I really needed to be a bigger geek that badly.}}}
+
He never sees Susan in his dreams – only her arrows.
Still, it warms him to know she is there. Sometimes Edmund already has his sword or crossbow in hand as if in empathy, but when he comes to face Jadis, even though he can easily dispatch the Witch, he finds he never does. Her black eyes bore into his as she murmurs the words and endearments that are by now so familiar, and his arms become heavy and leaded. She does not fight her fate, nor does she flee. Edmund wonders if maybe, just as he has grown and learned over the years, the Witch has too. Perhaps they have both learned patience and how to temper their passions. He recognizes in her acquiescence the consideration between battles and wars.
{{{She is coercing him through sacrificing herself, which I only realized upon a rereading; I hadn't been thinking about it when I was writing it. But yeah, Jadis is manipulating Edmund through sacrifice, because she knows that ends are also beginnings and that destruction is rebirth, &c. I didn’t expect that to tie in so well, so hooray for things working out after the fact!
So, like, does this mean that Edmund is some kind of god to Jadis, if she’s still alive? Or maybe not god, but just something implacably distant? Or, if she’s dreams, then does it just reflect Edmund wanting to be her god?
A semester of sociological theory and this is what I use it for. I wanted to have Jadis do Foucault and say something like, "A soul is just a prison to the body," she says, and her smile is almost sweet, "and don't let that overgrown cat tell you differently." But I didn't know where I'd put it.
Between this and The Light of a Different Sun, you can tell I kind of enjoy making up religions and fake civilizations.}}}
Susan’s arrows find Jadis again and again but, even when Edmund remembers to turn around, he can never see his sister. He thinks maybe he can feel her in the last bright flashes of the Witch’s death – there is a warmth that surrounds him that he thinks may be Jadis as she burns; or maybe Susan in his dreams, her golden light rushing to envelope him; or perhaps Susan in his bed in real life, soft and steady and gentle as she ever is {{{if you know what I mean}}}.
“Why do you think you can do it?” Edmund asks into the darkness of his bedroom. “Why can you kill her and I can’t?”
Possibly Edmund and Susan had some sex before this conversation. Possibly.
He hasn’t ever mentioned Susan climbing into his dreams since that first time. Edmund acknowledges it implicitly, by letting her sleep in his bed as if they have always done so, by automatically reaching for her when he wakes {{{if you know what I mean}}}, by not rejecting her solace when she holds him closer in the middle of the night {{{if you know what I mean}}}.
Susan, one arm across his chest and her head tucked into the crook between his neck and shoulder, answers, “Because it isn’t my dream. We are so easily overwhelmed by our own dreams.”
“So you think she really is just a dream, then?” And when she doesn’t reply, Edmund says, “You shouldn’t have to do this, you know. I ought to—”
“You sound just like Peter when you say that,” she muses. {{{How many times has she mentioned Peter now? The Pevensies just can’t escape each other.}}} “It’s not a matter of ‘have to’. Just because you faced her alone the last time, doesn’t mean you have to always. We came for you eventually, and we will again. Look, you were the one who asked me down here. I don’t begrudge you holding me at arm’s length, but I do wish you’d stop acting so surprised whenever I take your side.”
He hesitates. Apology would be clumsy and denial insincere, and Edmund finds himself not knowing quite what to say. He tries, “Even so.” When this doesn’t feel like enough, he tries, in a lighter tone, “If you ever tell anyone I let you inside my head, I’ll have yours.”
Susan raises her head and brushes her lips against his cheek. “Yes,” she says softly, “we all have our prides to think about, don’t we?”
+
“Your sister loves you,” the Witch says absently.
“It’s not unusual for a sister to love her brother.”
“Such a pretty girl, and so diligent with her study of magic. I would that she had stumbled into Narnia first, that I had met her first. Susan and I would have had a bit of fun, I think, before I turned her into a pretty statue.” {{{Jadis is totally the jealous lover here, which in her case means being a catty bitch.}}}
He knows she only says it to anger him, and it angers him even more that it works. “She would not fall to you, Jadis,” Edmund retorts. “Her heart can withstand more than you think.” {{{
animus_wyrmis said she noticed some Susan/Jadis, and she is not amiss. I am, like, a compulsive subtexter. If you see it, there is a likely chance I put it there on purpose.}}}And she laughs. “Don’t talk to me of women’s hearts, boy. You do not even know your own.”
Then, the arrow is loosed.
“My little flown bird,” says the Witch, and Edmund hears the mourning in her voice. Her eyes never leave his, and she fingers the arrow as if it were a piece of jewelry around her neck. “Your sister’s aim is truer than she thinks.”
She crumbles into snowflakes and the winds scatter her to the four corners of the world. When Edmund lifts his hand to shield his eyes from the flurries, the snow alights on his skin and does not melt. He tastes sugar on his tongue, and he wakes up.
+
There are scrolls and charms spread across the floor of Susan’s bedroom, abandoned for the afternoon for the basket of fruit Farroukh sent up to her. Susan holds out another date and Edmund takes it with one bite.
“Tell me, Ed,” she says after she licks the sticky sweetness from her fingers. “What would you wish for, if you were Al Adzin?”
Edmund says, “What would you wish for?”
Susan rolls her eyes. “Don’t answer my question with another question.”
“Don’t answer my question with an order,” he answers without pause. {{{Why so evasive, Ed?}}}
She chuckles. “Oh, Ed,” she says, cheeks pink with a little too much wine. “Perhaps you and I are not so different.”
Edmund raises an eyebrow. “Do you think me so different from you? Perhaps to your mind I don’t bleed when I am cut, or that I secretly have seven toes.”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it,” she retorts, leaning into him, “and I know perfectly well how many toes you have.”
{{{And then they have sex.}}}
He leaves her rooms reassured: that he loves his sister, loves Narnia, and has never been afraid to do what must be done. In his room, Edmund reviews export restrictions and agricultural subsidies until sunset, which is when the palace becomes quiet and still. Sunrise and sunset are meditative times devoted to the worship of Tash.
As twilight crawls into the sky, Edmund leaves his rooms and makes his way to the eastern wing where the older collections of the Tisroc’s royal library are kept, the ones to which only the Tisroc and his right-hand men have access. A few nights ago, during a walk around the gardens, the grand vizier had described to Edmund how to cut his hand to slake the blood-thirst of the lock, told him where the traps are set and how they might be defused. Yet, at the end of it, the grand vizier could not remember for the life of him what he had been talking about for the past many minutes. {{{Originally, I had Edmund bribing a servant with some rubies to let him into the library, but WTF, you really gonna trust the security of the secret magic library to any old servant? That’s high-level shit. Also, it’s much cooler having Edmund magically mess with the grand vizier.}}}
“You were talking about the irrigation infrastructure in the southern reaches,” Edmund reminded him gently.
“Ah, yes,” the grand vizier had nodded, as if emerging from a fog. He blinked a few times, frowning, then looked at the young king and continued as if nothing had happened. “I fear there will be famine if we are not able to preempt another source of grain.”
“Might I suggest lowering tariffs on crops?” Edmund had replied.
The conversation went on as such as the two men made their way through the Tisroc’s fertile gardens, politicians politely negotiating the wealth of their nations. {{{Further trade negotiation hijinks ensue here. ...Sort of.}}}
In the library, the dusty shelves are heavy with books, each page crackling with the arcana of centuries.
Is she omen? Is she memory? Is she dreams? The White Witch dies each night and Susan’s arrows pierce where his resolve cannot. Edmund doubts he will find the answers to these questions in old books, but he is confident he will find something. He’s not the type to sit still and let things wash over him, after all, not anymore.
+
{{{My beta calls this next part ‘the date rape scene’.}}}
Ancient Calormene script looks like the crests of waves. Edmund paints protective runes on Susan's body with the enchanted ink he procured from Mama Biguda. (They're only partly protective runes, but he doesn't tell his sister what else they do.) He traces the words along Susan’s spine, over her heart, down the side of her neck: points of power. From her ankle to her soft belly, a long lyric invoking old gods. {{{I have suuuuuch a kink for writing and painting on bodies. SUCH A KINK. I want to write the fic where Susan paints protective runes on Peter's body the night before a battle and maybe they get a little distracted.}}}
“Edmund,” says Susan, a little tightly.
“Shh,” he murmurs, and writes around her wrists, writes along her clavicles.
The ink glows and sinks into her skin and is gone, and in the end there's no proof she's been subject to spells except for a flush in her cheeks and an unfocused look in her eyes. She reaches for Edmund and he lets his sister curl into him, dizzy with magic.
Her body burns with fever, though Edmund has anticipated this aftereffect. Susan clutches him shivering as they lie on her bed, mumbling about how cold she is into his neck, her lips heated and soft and her fingers tightly curled around his arms. Edmund reaches for the blankets with some difficulty – Susan keeps grabbing him when he moves away. He makes soothing noises and murmurs nothings at her as he adjusts the blankets around them.
“Edmund,” Susan breathes. “O my brother, what have you done to me?”
“Don’t you trust me, Su?” he asks softly. “I thought we’re to trust each other, you and I.”
Her skin is raw and sensitive with magic; he can tell from the way she mewls at every brush of the sheets on her skin and how she curves into his touch. Edmund kisses her face to soothe her and she lets herself be lulled by it, kissing him back disconnectedly. Her hands cup his face, slide down his neck and turn into fists clutching his shirt as she murmurs his name, sometimes like a question and sometimes like a plea, {{{possibly a plea for sexing up}}}. His sister unfurls in his arms, and he exerts only the gentlest pressure in holding her still, holding her close. Edmund makes no unexpected movements and speaks very slow, very soft, the way one would to a dangerous animal caught in a trap. There is nothing to fear, he is telling her. More importantly, there is nothing to fight.
{{{I have had so much fun writing about magic in this fic, with the making up spells and magical trinkets, Jadis's duplicity, and this sensual Edmund/Susan mindfuckery. I kind of like how the previous paragraph worked out: touch as manipulation, the power play of seduction, sensory overload.}}}
“You do know,” she says, “that I would never hurt you.”
Edmund says, “Nor I you.”
“You are my brother.”
“And you are my sister.”
“Do you understand, Edmund?” She lifts her head to look into his eyes. “She won’t have you again. I want to promise you this. I want you to accept my promise.”
Edmund is bound to Peter by allegiance and duty, and bound to Lucy by a tenderness borne of the fact that she was the victim of his first significant betrayal. His relationship with Susan, however, has always been more nebulous. Her tolerance for frippery tries his sensibilities, and they have never been the closest of the four. He is hit by a sudden fondness for her now, with her face unmasked and her blue eyes wide. {{{Edmund may relate to Susan’s strategic duplicitousness, but just because he relates to her, it doesn’t necessarily mean he prefers her company. In this universe, at least. I can understand if he’s had it up to HERE with duplicitous people, and prefers Lucy's artlessness and Peter's constant good intention to Susan's wheeling and dealing and diplomatic smiles. Susan can be his ally, but maybe not a bosom buddy? They are... too similar? Something. Though, I am intrigued by the premise of Edmund reaching out to lipstick&parties!Susan in England, because he knows what it's like to be alienated from your family and to be a traitor for it. He knows the value of being forgived, but possibly Susan lashes out like, "I don't need forgiveness, Ed. I've done nothing wrong." In some ways, it's easier to betray your family for the Witch, because at least a Witch can be cast out and killed. But what if you betray your family for the world? What would you vanquish then? Susan says, "You keep calling it that, what I'm doing, but it's not. It's not betrayal. Oh Ed, I'm not a traitor."}}} The magic has laid her open, and Edmund cannot help but feel a flash of guilt for pushing her to this state. But certain things, he has decided, must come to pass.
He says, “No witch will have me, with you and your bow by my side.”
“We should never have come to Calormen.” Susan curls up with her head resting on Edmund’s shoulder. “We should never have.”
“Come, Su, don’t be like that. This is for Narnia. Aslan wants his country to be strong and prepared for anything.”
They are quiet again, waiting for Susan’s breathing to fall back to even. When she eventually speaks, struggling against the fever, there is a clarity in her voice that wasn’t there before. “Tell me what you’ve done to me, Edmund.”
“The spell protects one from possessions.”
“That’s not all it does. I feel it.”
“No doubt you’re feeling a lot of things right now, Su. You ought to just relax.”
“We should cast it on you too.”
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“Then how does it work?” she demands.
“You needn’t concern yourself with that.”
Susan clutches his shirt and although he does not look at her face, he can imagine her angered expression from the way she tenses her body. “Do not talk to me as if I were a child!”
“Sorry,” he says softly. “I know you’re not.” {{{Whatevs, he's apologizing 'cos he knows it won’t mean shit in the end anyway. He’s got Susan where he wants her.
“Edmund, tell me.”
“I’ll tell you later,” he promises, and kisses her forehead and strokes her hair, and never does.
{{{And then they have sex.
I totally planned a different ending for this scene, in which Susan asks Edmund to tell her a story and Edmund tells her a highly symbolic story that ties back to the aforementioned storytelling mechanics and his downward spiral to Jadis. I couldn't think of a tight enough story, though! I started scribbling one about a noble and handsome Calormene general named Aminzade the Elder, but it never went anywhere. Incidentally, Aminzade is also the name of the sky-ship captain that Edmund and Susan go with in the Narnia/Stardust AU of Last Battle revisionism. Aminzade was the last name of the guy who authored my sociology readings that week. I mean, Aminzade, what a badass name.}}}
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“Edmund!”
Susan is shaking him violently from sleep and he blinks to consciousness with the morning sun and his sister’s fury in his eyes. “What did you do?” she demands.
“Susan–” he says, rubbing his eyes, but the words tumble from her mouth like a flood.
“I can’t go into your dreams anymore. I couldn’t find you. I couldn’t find a way in. I could feel you and the winter and I couldn’t find a way in! What did you do?”
Susan’s fingers clench bruises into his skin, and attempts to wriggle out of her grasp are unsuccessful. She has always been able to hold Edmund down if she wants to, though in recent years, as he grew in height and his arms filled out, this has been increasingly due to Edmund’s submission than her strength {{{if you know what I mean}}}. It is one of the things he has learned from her: to let oneself be conquered as future investment, power through calculated assent.
He says to her, “Susan, calm yourself.”
“Don’t you dare!” she rages. “Don’t you dare tell me what to do, Edmund. What magic have you done to me? Or on yourself, or on what, I don’t know. You said it was a spell of protection!”
“I wasn’t lying,” he says quietly.
“What is it protecting me from?” she demands.
“It doesn’t just protect you.”
Her eyes narrow. “Undo this spell.”
“No.”
“Edmund.”
“Susan.” He raises his hand to stroke her cheek and she swats at it, rearing a little. Edmund takes the opportunity to surge up at her, catch her body in his arms and flip them over, trapping Susan between himself and the bed. {{{It's like, how many times can I put them in sexually charged positions and still claim it's gen? On the one hand, it's a pretty fun game, but on the other hand, sometimes a cigar is just be a cigar and should just be a cigar?}}}
“Get off me,” she hisses.
“Susan, it’s not your battle to fight. It never has been.”
“Get off me!”
He does. “I’m sorry. I never should’ve let this go on for as long as it has. Don’t waste your time on other people’s dreams, Su – nothing good comes of it. Besides, it wasn’t you she had, it was me.” And now she’s mine, he thinks. “She’s just dreams, after all. It’s just dreams.”
“It’s clearly not just dreams!”
“How are you so sure?”
She brushes her hair from her face and breathes deeply the way she does when trying to rein in her temper. Looks away, and has no answer. “You don’t have to do this alone.”
“Some fights are necessarily fought alone – you’ll learn this someday.”
Susan glares at him. “Don’t take that tone with me.” {{{She likes to give it, but doesn’t like to receive it.}}}
Edmund rolls his eyes.
He listens to her entreaties and accusations as she dresses herself, clumsy with frustration, but he is used to such displays of passion, and is unmoved. Edmund flops in an armchair and eats an apple, letting her anger pass through him. {{{I think I should have had him eating a different fruit. Apples are so fraught with symbolism, and here I just wanted him to display nonchalance through the careless eating of fruit.}}}
Susan doesn’t share his bed with him that night. Edmund is relieved, a little, but he tosses and turns, stretches out on a bed that suddenly feels too big for him.
When he dreams, Jadis smiles in wild delight and offers him her hand.
{{{I got into a discussion with
westingturtle about what would have happened after Edmund and Susan returned to Narnia post-fic. This is what I wrote: I would on second thought maybe take the less creepy route and make it about redemption or something. Lucy would notice Edmund being out of sorts, because Edmund was right when he said she would just try to stop him, because she knows her brother and his weaknesses. Well, they all do, but Peter has High King-ing to do and Susan has already tried and tried to reach out to Edmund since he barred her from his dreams, and things have been a little tense between them since then understandably. Lucy does less of shaking her finger and going, "You shouldn't have done that," and more of just trying to coax him out of his emo, tease him and race with him, and stay up with him if necessary, and basically love him back to himself. Lucy, at her most valiant, and her faith in the world.}}}End of my first commentary! What do you guys think?
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His hand brushes the underside of her wrist as she reaches for the desk, and the book drops from her hand. "Sorry," she whispers and he falls to one knee, her apologies and explanations breaking over his back. When he stands he is closer to her than he was before, and her head tips back to look at him as she accepts her book. Surprise flickers in her eyes, a faint shadow of calculation, before a demure blush covers her cheeks and he follows her back to her table, one hand tucked into the small of her back..
She would not be a Queen of Narnia, Edmund knows. He kisses her anyway.
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I just want to see how they take the things they've learned in Narnia and apply them to life outside, not just the angst.
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edmund redefines 'home'. he redefines 'loss'. he knows that EVERYONE's childhood memories are riddled with nostalgic fabrication. unlike susan, he's not afraid to have a foot in both worlds. dividing his allegiance between multiple worlds will not make edmund less of what he is. these worlds are a part of him, after all.
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http://themusingstream.livejournal.com/
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aaaawesome
thank you so much! for your time and effort, oh man, yaaaaaay
i've totally been neglecting the thread for a few days now, i ought to jump back in there soon.
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*dreamily* I would kill for a Susan POV of this. Although, you know, if there's anyone out there who knows how hard writing alternate POVs of the same story is, it's me.
flirtation, more magic, and Susan accidentally calling Edmund Peter, maybe.
YES.
I want to write the fic where Susan paints protective runes on Peter's body the night before a battle and maybe they get a little distracted.
ALSO YES. I highly encourage you in these pursuits!
a reply in three parts
+
after the dance, they bow to the crowd and to each other. edmund offers susan his arm and escorts her back to their seats. "nicely done, ed," she says quietly through a smile at their hosts. "you only messed up twice."
later--
susan laces their fingers together, but edmund soon finds this is a trick for getting them onto the floor one more time. "i've already fulfill my dancing quota," edmund reminds her, but susan just laughs and says, "don't be such a baby." he puts his free hand on her waist, she puts hers on his shoulder, and then she stands on her toes to kiss his cheek. "for luck," she smiles. "thank you," says edmund, and kisses her forehead and adds, "that's for impending revenge." the music starts, and they dance.
"wreak your revenge if it pleases you," says susan. "you don't frighten me, ed."
"i know," edmund replies. "it's frustrating."
+
"peter," says susan, trying to sound collected, "you'll get ink stains on my dress."
"susan," peter murmurs, "you've got dozens of dresses."
Re: a reply in three parts
why not the vaguely gratuitous peter/susan-ish flashbacks?
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peter kisses her forehead and says, "keep edmund out of trouble."
"i know you told edmund to keep ME out of trouble," susan says pointedly.
he smiles. "trouble from queen susan the gentle? never." they embrace, and he says, "have a safe trip. i'll miss you."
susan cups his face in her hands, whispers, "i'll try to miss you when i have time."
"be off with you!" peter laughs.
everyone finishes up their farewells and finally it really is time to go. as they leave the gates of cair paravel, susan spots peter watching from his balcony and points him out to edmund, who says, "doesn't he have better things to do?"
"just wave, you curmudgeon."
"he won't see us, you know," edmund mutters.
but they wave anyway and, to susan's delight, peter waves back.
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why such a curmudgeon, edmund?
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"you are. come here. share this wine with me."
"we've just entered the desert, and wine only further dehydrates you."
"come here, you curmudgeon."
"stop calling me that!"
"i'll stop calling you that when you stop acting like it."
+
susan wakes at dawn and edmund is not lying next to her. she wraps a cloak around herself, steps out of the tent into the chill dawn air and the blue light of almost-morning. there are footprints in the sand that lead from the tent to the top of a nearby dune. she hesitates -- edmund has always liked solitude more than she does -- but she finds herself stepping in his footprints anyway, following them, following him.
"su," edmund greets her when she stands at his side.
"is this a late night for you or an early start to the day?" she asks.
he doesn't answer her. they stand side by side and watch the sun rise in silence, except for once when edmund asks susan if she slept well, and she replies yes, yes she did.
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but he would be uncomfortable as an older brother (except he is, of course, but he isn't, not really).
he prefers to think of himself as a lone wolf who keeps getting roped, with varying degrees of gentleness, back into the pack.
apropos of nothing: it is SUCH A GOOD THING i can't vid, otherwise i would so vid pc to "mamma mia."
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'mamma mia'? i... don't understand.
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lyrics! (http://www.metrolyrics.com/mamma-mia-lyrics-meryl-streep.html) i've been cheated by you since i don't know when / so i made up my mind, it must come to an end / look at me now, will i ever learn?
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hfdasjk did you see the one where anna will and skandar were in the back of a jeep and they all had their arms around each other and it was the CUTEST EVER
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i was kind of shocked by how many things i didn't pick up on the first time i read this. like the telescope? that's actually one of my favorite parts of arabian nights.
wherever susan is, there should be sex. this is a fact.
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ooh awesome. i was kinda worried that my commentary would just say a bunch of obvious things, so i'm glad that worked out.
wherever susan is, there should be sex.
true words, or TRUER words?! i cannot decide!
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SMOOTH EDDIE P. XD
You incorporated the Eucharist into this? And wrote Judas/Jesus? YOU ARE MY HERO.
I like to read that Jadis was freaking Edmund out, because I was a little freaked out that he was so anxious to go back to her without Susan to interrupt. But I loved the repetition of Susan killing Jadis, again and again. very ritualistic.
the story-telling theme, about control, about every moment being another beginning and end, about the universe's creation! that one was fantastic.
This story is also very sexy, but you knew that. I am amazed at how many times you say "and then they had sex" and I totally believe it. And that body-spell-painting scene is one of my very very favorites, possibly ever. I swoon'd.
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YES I AM GOING TO CALL HIM THIS WAY TOO MUCH NOW
the mechanics of religion and how it fits into ppl's lives FASCINATE me, because i used to really struggle with it. i love all the metaphors and the Big Issues, the cycle of pain and salvation, ETERNITY ashdljsjl etc. so beautiful. btw, i think you might enjoy this story (http://yuletidetreasure.org/archive/76/giveme.html), which is a bible AU about jesus being a hippie in the 60s.
hehe, edmund just doesn't know what he wants. i like writing about characters who don't know what they want. i also like compulsively dropping subtext everywhere; this i partly blame on my high school theater years and my director's tendency to give unorthodox stage directions to get what she wants out of a scene. ("you guys are supposed to be best friends who haven't seen each other in 20 years! why such cold fish? take it from the top, except this time play it like you guys are LOVERS.")
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confession: when my stepmom took me to see Jesus Christ Superstar a couple years ago I thought she said it was set in the 70s, not written in the 70s, and I was SO EXCITED FOR MARTYR ROCKSTAR JESUS AU. GROUPIE MARY MAGDALENE. HIS BAND WITH 12 OTHER PEOPLE, INCL. SIMON PETER THE RAWK, and then the apostle paul starts a tribute band. shutting up nowwww
I also love characters who don't know what they want. It makes for really distressing/depressing character arcs but it is so great. And your director sounds like the BEST, like someone who probably ships a lot of characters in her head.
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hey, checking to see if you got my fic? again, no rush, just checking to see that i got the right address or that the internet didn't eat it up.
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yes I did! And I read it over twice and marked some stuff, and I don't know how picky you want me to be but I tried to strike a happy medium between "wuss" and "obnoxious." is it okay if I send it back now? and then if you want me to go over it again I will still have time :))
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MERCI CHERIE