Have 700 words of a random 2.4k Narnia thing I’ve been writing for the last hour or two.
Peter eked through his schooling with determination, subverting a life of being King into history and politics, clawing his way into higher education with the right comment, the right friends. It was very like endless summits, writing papers instead of treaties and shaking hands with professors instead of princes and princesses, but similar all the same. He wrote to the others constantly, their words as hidden as any spy as he shared anecdotes from his life, the sheer acceptance he’d found behind the closed doors of Academia. He was happy, and content, and that was something he’d never thought he’d regain.
Susan learned the ways of England and American high society like the courts of any lands she’d had to visit, armoured herself with stain and fabric and smiling eyes as her parents dragged her too and fro. She lost her second virginity for fun, happy for all her years of knowledge when it did not hurt, for picking out a man as eager to please her as himself. She wrote to Lucy about it, couching her words in their matrix of frivolity and lies, comparing him to her first lover with subtle jokes and jeers. A stranger looking at her words would see a woman concerned only with fashion and finding a husband; a King or Queen looking at her words would see Narnia dripping from every letter. She was their most stable ambassador to this world they were stuck in; she was still just as much a Queen as they were.
Edmund settled easier than any of the others, his mind and career serving him just as well in England as Narnia, so well that he nearly got recruited at fifteen, at sixteen, at seventeen; at eighteen, he’d said yes, but only on his terms. He learned how to fire a gun instead of a crossbow, how to wield combat knives instead of daggers. He picked up French, German, and Russian to go with his Narnian, Calormene, and Telmarine, learned more grips and grapples from disciplines Narnia had never heard of than he knew what to do with (that is a lie, he knew perfectly well what to do with them). He kept in contact with the others—his only stipulation—writing letters that slipped unnoticed past his superiors and fellows. He was still King Edmund the Just, High King Peter’s Left Hand and unofficial Shadow master to the Relm, but he was also Agent Edmund Pevensie of her Majestry’s service, and when you got down to it, there was no real difference between those lives.
Lucy slipped under their parents’ noticed, let the Professor sponsor her up through her education (although not quite through Academia; it might be fine for Peter, but what was good for the High King wasn’t always good for the Valiant Queen). She did not become a nurse (although she knew more battle triage than any girl in her year, and any boy; the vial was only so big, and did only so much), nor a diplomat like Su, or a spy like Edmund; she fell in with an acting troop near her school, fell in love with the players and stage hands and their worlds. She wasn’t a lead—not yet—but she was principle cast after only a year, her face and emotions finally responding to her like they should, and she revelled in it. She wrote to Susan about the men and woman that were her friends, trading tit-for-tat with comparisons to their analogies in Narnia, for secretes shared between sisters. Climbing on the train with the Professors and her brothers to meet with her cousin and his friend she waved goodbye to her latest closest friend, the lithe girl who looked so gawky during the day but transformed seamlessly into Tatiana one stage, composing her latest letter to Su about the girl, and about a certain dryad, sorry that her sister was stuck at a dance instead of heading off to a war meeting; it was just the sort of problem Su loved to solve.
