wandbreaker | Voice;

And before you ask, I'll explain where you are---where we are once I catch up with you.

[He doesn't say it, but he'd rather not waste time with the perfunctory description of place, non-time, and general environmental shifts with Edmund in the blizzard. That sort of thing is best left to places like a couch beside a well stoked fire...or, well, at least in doors. Honestly.

And he doesn't want to waste time, beyond that, because seconds ticking by are seconds Edmund could disappear again.]

Pete?

[There's some scrabbling]

I'm on top of a frozen...fountain.

[Doesn't ask where he is but he can't help]

Where are you?

I just said...

[ INTERRUPTED BY SNOW.....not even kidding, the sound cuts out for a second... ]

[ and the sound cuts back in with a whoosh... ]

I'm on my way to you. We are in...another world, sort of.

[The truth is he doesn't really think of it as a 'world' the way he thinks of Earth, the way he thinks of Narnia, but he can't think of a single word to supply instead. So 'world' suffices for the moment until a more detailed explanation, which he still withholds for now. It's confusing enough without being able to see each other, without being able to prove by a look and a hand on one's shoulder that they are truly here, that here exists...that it isn't all a dream or a dream of a dream.]

What were you just doing anyway? ...homework?

[Trying to place when more than where or what he was up to, but one can tell the other often enough.]

[PAUSE as he processes the other world thing but that's surprisingly easy]

Algebra. I was at school just five minutes [WHOOSH] and generally I try and get it done before I end up in another world.

[No doubt easier for them than a majority of people, really and Peter rolls his eyes at the reply but there's a smile too...not that anyone can see that, even the other person coming along to point the Just in the right direction....that being Out of the Blizzard. Also to what Peter has come to think of as 'home' here...something he did not ask for but has been grateful for, curses and the insanity they make for or not. A gift doesn't have to be an easy thing and really the most important ones in Peter's life never have been.]

We don't lose any time where we left off. You'll still get it done before everyone else, I imagine.

Well I'd hate to get a reputation of someone who leaves off until the last minute.

[Whoooosh whooosh. Edmund is curled up with his back against the wind]

And the girls? Are they with you?

Yes, I know.

[Whooooooooooooooosh...snow....well the sound of wind more like but you know. ]

And yes to that too. Well---not with me right now, but they're back at the house.

It's just been you who's---

Every time.

The house?

Right right I'm not asking.

Later on, after the reunion he stopped expecting but never stopped hoping for in this place between places, Peter shows Edmund the way to the room he kept during his previous stay. It has remained untouched for the most part where moving items around is concerned. Though Peter has visited the room--most often when he needed to focus his thoughts, to do more than think, to meditate to a degree on this or that--it has not been in him to try to move things around physically or otherwise regarding Edmund for a long, long time. The only thing he has picked up on occasion--and on such occasions, having already picked it up, dusted it off with his sleeve or shirttail--is the silver crown. It does not mean everything, hardly. A king is not defined by the tangible proof of his throne, but it means a great deal anyway to Peter. All of their crowns do, to him, especially since receiving them as the staying matter after one such 'curse' that wasn't a curse at all to him.

Of all the privileges this hodgepodge of worlds has given him, the two foremost in his heart are the ability to see those he would not otherwise have been able to see at all or again, and also the ability to be his whole self. Edmund understood perhaps most of Peter's distaste for the lie of boyhood thrown back upon him during a year in-between, with Lucy second most in her own way and Susan third through no fault of her own though at the time Peter could not take the time to channel his true age and admit that. He was bitter and he was angry and through those emotions he acted as young as he looked, younger even, embarrassingly, but to this day he does not think his reaction was wrong. How could it be? It couldn't be wrong not to understand what was never explained, but one of a few differences now is that the lack of understanding has been tempered with an equalizing sort of faith that one day he will. He does not believe this because it is right or wrong. As the kind of person that he became in Narnia--and just as important, the kind of person he was before and is now, some things ever changing and others that will now stay the same until the end of his days--he has to keep that faith.

It is a quiet presence, sometimes absolutely silent to the point of unhinging him still but now when he questions, he questions from a place of simply not knowing rather than the starker matter of doubt. Doubt is for the boy who didn't believe Lucy Pevensie when she told him about the wardrobe, for the boy who as good as drove his brother to betrayal, for the boy he hasn't been for some time but not terribly long ago revisited--caught between ages. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees two such ages in the Just despite the fact that he only wears one, just like Peter. But knowing makes every difference.

When they reach Edmund's quarters--made up of several rooms really in this much more expansive dwelling than the first--he does not open the door, merely stepping side and half nodding at it, which is as good as saying this has been yours and it still is.

The thing about traveling to Narnia - not once but twice - is that it has given Edmund not only the ability to look back at the world in a certain way, with certain angles, but also the ability to take most experiences in stride. It seems natural, or at least it doesn't seem strange, that he is in this expansive house with beautiful furnishings where his family has clearly made a home - his family and Caspian, of all people - and looking at this bedroom which is so clearly his.

The only part that bothers him is the fact that he doesn't remember any of it: the room is decorated clearly to his taste, the way the furniture is laid out is something particular to the Just, rooms mimicking what he had in Cair Paravel. But some things are strangely and uncomfortably unfamiliar, at the same time that he knows them.

Edmund tries not to worry about it. Instead he looks over at his older brother, who looks at ease in his surroundings and ill at ease about his age - it's not something specific, it's just the way that Peter is, something that Edmund knows but anyone who isn't family wouldn't know how to judge - and raises his eyebrows. "So now what?"

So now what; words that could mean a lot or a little, depending on how Peter reads into them. They could mean so now what do we do, do I sleep and get on with my day tomorrow, or does it mean something more entwined with responsibility. He's never been sent to another world where he hasn't been expected to take responsibility for something - a throne, a war, and he knows that Peter understands that too.

"Now," he pauses, his posture casual but a definition of some kind of waiting in it. Not tension, but something that keeps it from being easy. "...well...there's getting used to it first, I suppose." Before living anyway, because it isn't as if this is all something they've done before. Certainly, passed through to another world, but a place where there is no prophecy or a kingdom to reclaim and rebuild and a new future to place on the throne--always their responsibility, one way or another; an honor, he once said to the great lion. It always will be.

His hand goes to the back of his neck, not uncomfortable but the sort of meaningless motion that takes up a pause instead of a shrug.

"I know it's strange." Unsettling. "When I first arrived, I had forgotten being here too. I still don't remember anything before then." He no longer frowns when he says this, though he remains displeased with it on the whole. Much better to remember all one does, all one experiences, isn't it? But it's out of his control as some very important things are, as are other things that are very much not. Balanced. Nowhere does he say 'it gets better', though it did for him, to the point that he could move beyond what he could not recall and focus on everything he could. With two years approaching this fall, he has enough to attribute it to, certainly. He also does not say 'give it time', because that's obvious and his brother will know it inherently. In fact, a great deal of what one might miss in the silence, in what Peter does not say, is the bulk of what between the two Pevensies is the actual communication. They have had years to learn the telling quirks of wordless conveying, making up in part for years of just the opposite--a lack of communication with plenty of words and most of them unkind, regrettable things.

What now, though. Indeed.

"Curses," he barely frowns, but it's enough to say he does not approve of the name for these as all of them are not unhappy things, but as they say 'majority rules', and that's what they've been called long before Peter fell into the picture (again). Explaining them earlier was both simple and irritating, as ever it is. To say these things in words is just not the equivalent to witnessing or experiencing them firsthand, but they all did their part in sharing what might be useful. "...aside," he continues. "We live, spend our time how we see fit." Working. Visiting the library. General exploring. Saying hello to the salamander named Salamander. For Peter, that's mostly it, and he knows it varies for each of the household as much as every individual in the City's entirety.

Strange is a good way to begin to describe it. At least in Narnia, he remembered everything: there wasn't this strange feeling of expectation that someone remembers something that Edmund himself doesn't recall. But Narnia is different, naturally. "You'd think we'd be used to strange by now," he says, going through the drawers in his desk. Everything is exactly as it should be, at least in a desk that belongs to Edmund. It is strange. But there's something right about the room, something that makes him feel welcome.

And it's definitely not the black cat sitting on the bed, flicking his tail casually as he naps.

Ed takes in Peter's words. Little responsibility, then, is what he hears. Time to go out and see the City in a way that he can be a teenager and not a king, although he is both: it is a little less evident in the way that Ed moves than in the way Peter does. Differences in brothers, once that are obvious to anyone watching. But Ed doesn't mind it as much. Maybe he is not old enough for it to matter, yet.

"Curses aside," Edmund replies. He's still not sure he understands curses, but that's to be expected, really. "No school?"

The laugh here is short, clipped even, but not forcibly so.

"No, no school," a pause as he corrects himself. "Well, there is a school, but from what I hear, its attendance is all of a handful of citizens." In short, it isn't mandatory here, and that much is a relief to Peter who has no interest in repeating too many aspects of growing up twice or three times. He will go to school in England, concentrate in medicine or perhaps teaching--something that facilitates a change involving improvement in the best cases and a matter of truth at bare minimum in the worst as far as he can tell, as far as he would treat it himself. The black cat on the bed pauses in the tail flicking to stretch his forward legs and invert his back in a reach articulated by a purr that is nearly visible. "That's Shadow, by the way." Peter refrains from pointing out the obvious; that being how it is likely Edmund will have to briefly fight for his bed back. Maybe. It depends on how lazy Shadow is or isn't, mostly.

Shadow. The cat looks like something the girls would fight for. Not that Peter is heartless to animals, but the High King of Narnia isn't like Lucy or even Susan when it comes to homeless pets. Caspian notwithstanding.

Edmund circulates through possible things for him to do in the City, but he sets that aside now too. From the way Peter reacted, it's clear that Ed's been missed. It's a nice feeling, even if he doesn't like the idea of his family being separated. It launches all kinds of old anxieties, anxieties about the Witch and a betrayal that happened so long ago. Edmund sits on the bed and Shadow gives him a cursory glance, as if he's challenging him to the space that by all rights belongs to the King of Narnia.

"Maybe I should pick up a hobby. Snowshoeing, I hear that's a good one for cold climates." He knows that this blizzard is a curse, but it was still slow-going to get back to the house that is more like a compound. He brushes the joke off, though. "I'm glad we're altogether."

The words unsaid are 'sorry I wasn't here sooner', but Edmund will never say that, not to Peter. To Lucy, perhaps, and even Susan. But not to his older brother.

Plenty of things ought to be said in life but there are nearly as many that do not need to be if one stops to think about them for a moment, or to consider their presence without the verbalization. Edmund doesn't need to apologize because it wasn't his fault in the first place, and as far as Peter is concerned that's that on the subject.

"Snowshoeing, if you like," he replies dryly and continues with barely a breath, "But no hurry." That is both true and terribly the opposite, but the latter cannot be helped. Even as Edmund could vanish, so too could Peter, could Susan, could Lucy, could Caspian. Any one of them. All of them. So it only makes sense enough to decide there is no rush on what precisely to do with one's time as long as one does something. Anything is better than nothing, barring a few of the obvious exceptions to the rule, none of which the Just is likely to endorse or involve himself in anyway.

"I don't suspect one can hurry in snowshoes," Edmund points out in a ridiculously unnecessary way. He reaches to scratch the cat behind the ears. There are a lot of things that they don't have to say: where Ed fits into the scheme of this house, because he will be what he always is.

This situation could be much more distressing than it is, but having family makes it much better. At least the introduction to the City is less confusing, if nothing else.

"Tomorrow, will you show me around, or am I getting lost on my own?"

Leaning in the doorway, arms folded, the blond smiles a little again, but this many half and quarter smiles manage to make up more than his usual share shown at all, outside of the usual suspects.

"I," he emphasizes, "Don't care much for snowshoeing," and his look here is wry because a joke is a joke is a joke---one he moves on from without pause, "But if the weather decides to catch back up to the proper season," and here is the pause. Said pause seamlessly transitions into a pointed nod and shrug, the equivalent to of course I will and we won't be getting lost anyway and the like. His gaze drops to the now rather attention-fed feline. "He favors your room regularly." This can also be read as you may have trouble reclaiming your bed, but Edmund will find that out sooner than later for himself.

If Peter keeps smiling his face will freeze that way, and then what will the populace think? That the High King is in a good mood? Imagine their shock and distress at that idea. But Edmund likes the smiles, they're encouraging, and he offers his own back.

"Of course he does, now that I'm here he'll favor it even more, I reckon," Edmund says, his knowledge of the nature of felines relatively clear-sighted. Peter probably feeds it, which it why it stays away from the blond's room. And it's not that he expect to get lost, it just seems an inevitability if he goes out on his own.

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but maybe I believe in another place // if you go, you won't look back

but maybe I believe in another place // if you go, you won't look back

but maybe I believe in another place // if you go, you won't look back

but maybe I believe in another place // if you go, you won't look back

but maybe I believe in another place // if you go, you won't look back

but maybe I believe in another place // if you go, you won't look back

but maybe I believe in another place // if you go, you won't look back

but maybe I believe in another place // if you go, you won't look back

but maybe I believe in another place // if you go, you won't look back

but maybe I believe in another place // if you go, you won't look back