He finds his brother sorting through a room one level below ground floor. It is one of the few remaining rooms left unsorted, or it was until now. What Edmund looks for, Peter doesn't know, but he hovers like someone who is there in full form instead of someone invisible and breathless. Peter has found the Just before, but never with an opportunity to speak such as the one that the younger Pevensie uncovers now. Not a record player, but the device is familiar, and as all of Peter's efforts toward communication through the device have gone absolutely nowhere, he has for some time now surmised that he has to understand the mechanics of the thing he speaks through, at least loosely. Before this he never thought he would have reason to need to further understand the workings of the network speakers, but then, he didn't think he would need to know how to move air without being there to move, or to say something to anyone long after death itself.
Why this place holds him in this stagnating unknown is beyond him, but the pressure seems to build by the day. Peter is tired of reaching for the people he loves and not being able to do more than that. He is tired of being a nothingness whose own existence is contradictory, a non-living paradox that only serves to frustrate him more as time goes on, seemingly with and without him all at once. Hardly forgotten, but that too bothers him. If he had been let go, he could at least be with them, albeit with the fearful difference of summer warmth and winter's cold, but a presence is a presence. Even if he had been taken from this place, there would be some closure for them.
As it is, there is neither the first nor the second and he doesn't know what to think anymore, directing all of his attentions into the gramophone, eliciting at first only a crackle of air, but it's clear that Edmund hasn't caused it himself and he knows that his brother has worked on even less indication than that and come to accurate conclusions before. He'll understand.
The crackling break in the silence would only mean one thing, after all.
Pay attention.
He seems to be asking people that a lot lately, but it simplifies things when he's certain they are attentive and not in a state when they think they might have imagined it or dreamed it. For Peter is not an imagined being, not a dream, not a dream of a dream; he's real, for all that life has left him, and the divide between here and not here is as wide as ever.
Because now we say goodnight from our own separate sides;
Why this place holds him in this stagnating unknown is beyond him, but the pressure seems to build by the day. Peter is tired of reaching for the people he loves and not being able to do more than that. He is tired of being a nothingness whose own existence is contradictory, a non-living paradox that only serves to frustrate him more as time goes on, seemingly with and without him all at once. Hardly forgotten, but that too bothers him. If he had been let go, he could at least be with them, albeit with the fearful difference of summer warmth and winter's cold, but a presence is a presence. Even if he had been taken from this place, there would be some closure for them.
As it is, there is neither the first nor the second and he doesn't know what to think anymore, directing all of his attentions into the gramophone, eliciting at first only a crackle of air, but it's clear that Edmund hasn't caused it himself and he knows that his brother has worked on even less indication than that and come to accurate conclusions before. He'll understand.
The crackling break in the silence would only mean one thing, after all.
Pay attention.
He seems to be asking people that a lot lately, but it simplifies things when he's certain they are attentive and not in a state when they think they might have imagined it or dreamed it. For Peter is not an imagined being, not a dream, not a dream of a dream; he's real, for all that life has left him, and the divide between here and not here is as wide as ever.
Maybe more so now.