http://nfe-gremlin.livejournal.com/ (![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png)
nfe-gremlin.livejournal.com) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
narniaexchange2010-09-22 09:42 am
nfe-gremlin.livejournal.com) wrote in narniaexchange2010-09-22 09:42 am
Entry tags:
Talking of Michelangelo - for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
barely_passing
Title: Talking of Michelangelo
Author:animus_wyrmis
Recipient:barely_passing
Rating: G
Possible Spoilers/Warnings: none
Notes Huge thanks to [my betas] for betaing, brainstorming, and hand holding; this fic wouldn't be what it is without them. One quote and the title taken from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, prayerful quotes from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, and the quote from the book at the bookstore from Catullus 101 (my translation).
Summary: Nora met Edmund at an in-between time and in in-between places.
You were sitting on a gravestone, the first time you saw him. The morning was cool and the sun filtered down through the leaves of an apple tree overhead and onto the letter in your hands, three quarters of it blacked out by censors and the bottom half wrinkled from water damage.
Dear Nora, it started. It was the first letter you had had in a long time, and it contained nothing you didn’t already know and everything you didn’t want to read about the trenches and his leg and If I don’t come home, Nora, you’ve got to promise to look after Will for me.
It was dated two months ago.
You crumpled it up and smoothed it out again, folded it and slipped it into the pocket of your jumper and then pulled it back out and unfolded it, in case you had missed something between the lines. You were so engrossed that you didn’t see him come up, but suddenly he was there next to you, perched on a cracked gravestone with a journal and a pencil. “I don’t think it says anything different this time,” he said, and you started up with the letter clutched between your fingers. “Sorry,” he said next, and then, “I’m Edmund.”
“Nora,” you said after a moment. When you looked at him properly you saw that he wasn’t any older than twelve, scrawny besides, and in rather desperate need of a haircut. “It’s from a friend,” you added, although you weren’t sure yet why you thought he deserved more of an answer. “It’s the only thing I’ve gotten from him in months.”
“My parents and my sister are en route to America,” he said. “I worry about them.”
Who said I was worried, you wanted to say, but instead you sat back down with your back against a mossy tombstone and watched him pick at the marble under his fingers. “I miss him, is all,” you said, because you didn’t feel comfortable admitting the rest to him, that his train had left with too many words unspoken between the two of you, and you kept his letters like a child’s toy under your pillow in case you woke up terrified in the night. “If something happened and I didn’t find out—I don’t like that he’s a world away.”
“Huh,” was all Edmund said, and then it was nearly ten o’clock and you both had to be somewhere else, so you packed up your letter and he packed up his journal. You didn’t expect to see him again. You were wrong.
+
“What do you think Heaven is like?” you asked the second time you saw him. You were back in the graveyard again, the letter still in your pocket, although this time you had climbed the apple tree and he was looking up at you, sprawled out on the ground with his head pillowed on his arms and his journal lying open across his stomach.
“Home,” he said, which was what your father always said (your father was a vicar), although your father always gave you the impression that he expected to walk into Paradise the same way he walked into the vicarage, with one of Mother’s pies in the oven and Mother waiting for him with a smile on her face. Edmund did not say it like that; he sounded homesick.
You jumped down from your branch and said, “Is this not home then?”
“I’m staying with my cousin,” he told you. “My sister and I. It isn’t so bad, really, but my aunt and uncle are terrible sorts and my cousin is a prat.”
“I’m with my aunt as well,” you said, which was true: she was your great-aunt and getting on in years, and your mother had sent you to be a light in the darkness and a cane on the stairs. You didn’t mind. She was a good woman, your great-aunt, and she told stories and sang hymns and pretended not to notice when the post came and went and you blinked back tears.
“They’re quite modern,” Edmund said next. “And I am rather old-fashioned, I think. So we jar each other a little bit.”
I am rather old-fashioned was a queer thing to hear from a boy but you let it pass because he interested you. When you glanced over you saw that the journal was a sketchpad, the pages covered with dark pencil and the occasional watercolor. “May I see?” you asked, and he handed it over to you without comment.
The first few pages were castles and knights on horseback, Arthurian stuff, and you glanced through them without much interest. It wasn’t until perhaps ten pages in that the drawings became landscapes, all rolling fields and wintery meadows, and then a stone table cracked in two and littered with debris. It was the first watercolor. “What’s this?” you asked, tracing it.
“A table,” he said. “We went there once.”
“Not what is it of,” you said. “What is it about?”
And Edmund said, “Salvation.”
“Salvation,” you repeated, tasting the word on your tongue. Salvation was something you knew about, because it was a word that danced across your father’s sermons and Sunday afternoon dinners and late-night cups of tea. Salvation was guilt and redemption and your hands covered in the blood of Someone who had died for you. Salvation meant that even the end of the world could never separate you from the people you loved. “Huh.”
“Someone died for me,” he said after a moment. “I think about it sometimes. Someone died so that I could live, and never asked if that was a price I would be willing to pay.”
“Someone who could come back to life, remember,” you told him, even though resurrection didn’t cancel out dying in agony. “Although,” you added, ignoring the prickling feeling on the back of your neck that meant you were about to say something blasphemous, “it doesn’t seem fair, does it? That He let the women cry over his corpse and dress it for burial, when they didn’t know that the worst three days of their lives were a lie.”
His face twisted at your words into something ugly, and he stood up and took the sketchpad back roughly. “I have to go,” he said.
I believe in one God the Father Almighty, you promised anyone listening after he left, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. You believed. You were baptized and confirmed. You believed.
+
“How old are you anyway?” you asked the third time you saw him. There were no graves this time, and no sun; a storm had blown up, all lightning and thunder and driving rain, and the two of you had taken refuge in the same bookstore. It was the sort of rambling shop that was lined with narrow aisles and floor-to-ceiling shelves, with books crammed into every available space. You were reaching for a book of sonnets four shelves above Edmund’s head.
He picked his head out of a dusty book and scooted about six inches to the left. “Depends on how you count it.”
“Usually by years,” you said. “One year for every three hundred and sixty-five days you spent breathing.”
“Then…” He appeared to be doing calculations in his head. “Say thirty-two.”
“Too old for me,” you told him with a laugh, pulling out your book and sinking to the floor next to him. Once, when you were young, your cousin’s friend had put an arm around you and said, “Nora, darling, I wish you were as old as you sound.” Your cousin had laughed in a way you did not understand; you understood it now.
“I thought you had a friend fighting,” he said.
“Not that kind of friend,” you said.
“You heard anything more?”
“No,” you said, and let the tips of your fingers brush against the outline of an envelope in your pocket. “He’s not required to write me.”
“Of course not,” Edmund said. He paused, and the words I don’t care if he writes me anyhow formed on your lips, and died before you spoke them. “I had a friend who stopped writing to me, once. We figured they were just into enemy territory and would get letters back as soon as they could.”
“What happened?” you asked, shutting your eyes and letting the words drift over you. “Did you keep writing to him?”
“Yeah, for a while. Then we got the news that he’d died.”
“What was his name?”
“Beaver,” he said.
You felt a shadow pass over the two of you, and you put an arm around Edmund’s trembling shoulder and felt him lean into you. “How’d it happen?”
“Ambush,” he said shortly, his breath stirring your hair. You ran your thumb in circles on his shoulder blade, let your fingers walk across his arm.
“I’m sorry.”
“It was a lifetime ago.”
The two of you sat there until the wind stopped, surrounded by the smell of musty books. The rain plunk-plunked on the roof and Edmund sniffled into your shirt, and you pretended like you couldn’t hear either and didn’t let the tears fall. When the shop girl started eying you suspiciously you pulled a book off the shelf and started to read: Brought through many lands and waters, I am here, brother, for these bleak sacrifices, to give you the last service of death and to speak in vain to mute ashes…
+
The fourth time you saw him was the beginning of the end, although you didn’t know it until later. It was two weeks since the storm, the sun warming your shoulders through your blouse and making you squint your eyes as you stared up through the branches of the apple tree. He snuck up behind you and you thought for a fleeting moment that you smelled salt. “Hello, Nora,” he said, and his voice was four notes deeper and came from somewhere above your head as you whirled around.
“Hello, Edmund,” you said, and your eyes lingered on his shoulders, suddenly broader, and his arms, too large for his shirt. “You’re older,” you said, stupidly. “How can you be older in two weeks?”
“I don’t think it’s about how many years you’ve breathed,” he said. “I think you were wrong about that.”
“Then what?”
“How old you feel.”
“How old do you feel?” you asked, ignoring the tightness across your chest when his fingers traced your cheek.
“Old enough.”
You kissed him in the shade of the tree, the smell of late apple blossoms wafting toward you on the wind, and he wrapped his arms around you as if he would never let go. When you broke to breathe he whispered, “Why are we in this world and not another, Nora?”
“To do what is right,” you said automatically, a lifetime of sermons and lectures ingrained into your mind. “To serve and glorify the Lord.”
“To get to know Him in this world,” Edmund agreed mournfully, and he pulled away from you. “Why would He come in the shape of a Lamb?”
“The Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world,” you said, although you had never thought of a literal lamb but of the metaphor, the sacrificial lamb, the blood spilled on the doors of the Israelites. Christ spilled his blood when they whipped him and washed away your sins, and in the end when you came in front of the throne you would be forgiven.
“I never asked for my sins to be taken away,” Edmund said, and you backed away. “I never wanted that. I never asked anyone to die in my place.”
“He had to die in order to rise again. It was His will,” you said, but Edmund just shook his head.
“Why write that into the Deep Magic? Why demand that a traitor be destroyed, unless an innocent died in his place? Why should betrayal demand a blood sacrifice?”
“I don’t understand,” you said, and fled, twigs cracking underfoot as you left him behind.
The telegram came for you that night.
+
The last time you saw him he looked like a child again, and you wondered if you had dreamed it all, the smell of the apple blossoms and the pressure of his hands on your waist, the desperation in his voice when he spoke against the God you loved. “Nora,” he said. “I hoped I would see you before we left.”
“Where are you going?” you asked. “I thought your parents were gone the whole summer.”
“A family friend invited us to stay for the rest of the month,” Edmund said. “It all happened very quickly. I think my aunt and uncle had something to do with it; they think we’re a bad influence on my cousin.”
“I thought you said your cousin was a prat,” you said, feeling oddly off-kilter as you spoke. It was not so much that you had missed a beat in the conversation, but rather a bar and a half.
“I suppose he was,” Edmund said, as if it took him a moment or two to remember. When he shook his head to clear it you felt as if he were clearing you out as well. “I won’t be back, I don’t think. But I—if you wanted to write,” he said, and handed you a folded sheet of paper.
“I’ll do that,” you said with a smile, knowing that you wouldn’t. “Goodbye, Edmund.”
That night you wore your oldest nightgown and brushed your hair until it shone, two hundred strokes, and you fixed yourself a warm mug of milk and sipped it slowly. You took the letters from under your pillow and smoothed them out, and then you slipped them, one by one, between the pages of a book you never read.
Let us go then, you and I, said the book when you shut it.
The page with Edmund’s address on it you folded twice and placed carefully under your pillow, in case you woke up in the night.
Original Prompt:
What I want:
- A scene describing what Caspian was thinking the first time he held Rillian.
- Adult Lucy as a knight, who fights alongside Peter and Edmund or/and Edmund and Lucy portrayed as best friends, equals, partners in crime who sneak off to explore. I will love you forever, if Lucy wears trousers in the fic.
- Reepicheep watching a sun rise for the last time.
- A story in the POV of some random person that tells of Lucy's coming of age party. This should focus solely on how beautiful, graceful and just plain great Lucy is in the eyes of this person, not how fabulous Susan is, because while Susan is fabulous Lucy needs a moment to shine. Make Lucy mature, please.
- An aged Susan looking back on her life, the people she's met, places she's gone and what not.
- A fic that is based around the song Already Gone by Sugerland. Characters: Edmund and an original OC of your making. No Mary Sues.
Prompt words/objects/quotes/whatever:
- Lady knight<
- “Love is something eternal; the aspect may change, but not the essence”
What I definitely don't want in my fic: slash, incest, Suspian, crossover, smut, Lucy being sidelined, acting sanctimonious or portrayed as a forever eight year old, graphic violence, Lucy being portrayed as a good cook.
Author:
animus_wyrmisRecipient:
barely_passingRating: G
Possible Spoilers/Warnings: none
Notes Huge thanks to [my betas] for betaing, brainstorming, and hand holding; this fic wouldn't be what it is without them. One quote and the title taken from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, prayerful quotes from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, and the quote from the book at the bookstore from Catullus 101 (my translation).
Summary: Nora met Edmund at an in-between time and in in-between places.
You were sitting on a gravestone, the first time you saw him. The morning was cool and the sun filtered down through the leaves of an apple tree overhead and onto the letter in your hands, three quarters of it blacked out by censors and the bottom half wrinkled from water damage.
Dear Nora, it started. It was the first letter you had had in a long time, and it contained nothing you didn’t already know and everything you didn’t want to read about the trenches and his leg and If I don’t come home, Nora, you’ve got to promise to look after Will for me.
It was dated two months ago.
You crumpled it up and smoothed it out again, folded it and slipped it into the pocket of your jumper and then pulled it back out and unfolded it, in case you had missed something between the lines. You were so engrossed that you didn’t see him come up, but suddenly he was there next to you, perched on a cracked gravestone with a journal and a pencil. “I don’t think it says anything different this time,” he said, and you started up with the letter clutched between your fingers. “Sorry,” he said next, and then, “I’m Edmund.”
“Nora,” you said after a moment. When you looked at him properly you saw that he wasn’t any older than twelve, scrawny besides, and in rather desperate need of a haircut. “It’s from a friend,” you added, although you weren’t sure yet why you thought he deserved more of an answer. “It’s the only thing I’ve gotten from him in months.”
“My parents and my sister are en route to America,” he said. “I worry about them.”
Who said I was worried, you wanted to say, but instead you sat back down with your back against a mossy tombstone and watched him pick at the marble under his fingers. “I miss him, is all,” you said, because you didn’t feel comfortable admitting the rest to him, that his train had left with too many words unspoken between the two of you, and you kept his letters like a child’s toy under your pillow in case you woke up terrified in the night. “If something happened and I didn’t find out—I don’t like that he’s a world away.”
“Huh,” was all Edmund said, and then it was nearly ten o’clock and you both had to be somewhere else, so you packed up your letter and he packed up his journal. You didn’t expect to see him again. You were wrong.
+
“What do you think Heaven is like?” you asked the second time you saw him. You were back in the graveyard again, the letter still in your pocket, although this time you had climbed the apple tree and he was looking up at you, sprawled out on the ground with his head pillowed on his arms and his journal lying open across his stomach.
“Home,” he said, which was what your father always said (your father was a vicar), although your father always gave you the impression that he expected to walk into Paradise the same way he walked into the vicarage, with one of Mother’s pies in the oven and Mother waiting for him with a smile on her face. Edmund did not say it like that; he sounded homesick.
You jumped down from your branch and said, “Is this not home then?”
“I’m staying with my cousin,” he told you. “My sister and I. It isn’t so bad, really, but my aunt and uncle are terrible sorts and my cousin is a prat.”
“I’m with my aunt as well,” you said, which was true: she was your great-aunt and getting on in years, and your mother had sent you to be a light in the darkness and a cane on the stairs. You didn’t mind. She was a good woman, your great-aunt, and she told stories and sang hymns and pretended not to notice when the post came and went and you blinked back tears.
“They’re quite modern,” Edmund said next. “And I am rather old-fashioned, I think. So we jar each other a little bit.”
I am rather old-fashioned was a queer thing to hear from a boy but you let it pass because he interested you. When you glanced over you saw that the journal was a sketchpad, the pages covered with dark pencil and the occasional watercolor. “May I see?” you asked, and he handed it over to you without comment.
The first few pages were castles and knights on horseback, Arthurian stuff, and you glanced through them without much interest. It wasn’t until perhaps ten pages in that the drawings became landscapes, all rolling fields and wintery meadows, and then a stone table cracked in two and littered with debris. It was the first watercolor. “What’s this?” you asked, tracing it.
“A table,” he said. “We went there once.”
“Not what is it of,” you said. “What is it about?”
And Edmund said, “Salvation.”
“Salvation,” you repeated, tasting the word on your tongue. Salvation was something you knew about, because it was a word that danced across your father’s sermons and Sunday afternoon dinners and late-night cups of tea. Salvation was guilt and redemption and your hands covered in the blood of Someone who had died for you. Salvation meant that even the end of the world could never separate you from the people you loved. “Huh.”
“Someone died for me,” he said after a moment. “I think about it sometimes. Someone died so that I could live, and never asked if that was a price I would be willing to pay.”
“Someone who could come back to life, remember,” you told him, even though resurrection didn’t cancel out dying in agony. “Although,” you added, ignoring the prickling feeling on the back of your neck that meant you were about to say something blasphemous, “it doesn’t seem fair, does it? That He let the women cry over his corpse and dress it for burial, when they didn’t know that the worst three days of their lives were a lie.”
His face twisted at your words into something ugly, and he stood up and took the sketchpad back roughly. “I have to go,” he said.
I believe in one God the Father Almighty, you promised anyone listening after he left, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. You believed. You were baptized and confirmed. You believed.
+
“How old are you anyway?” you asked the third time you saw him. There were no graves this time, and no sun; a storm had blown up, all lightning and thunder and driving rain, and the two of you had taken refuge in the same bookstore. It was the sort of rambling shop that was lined with narrow aisles and floor-to-ceiling shelves, with books crammed into every available space. You were reaching for a book of sonnets four shelves above Edmund’s head.
He picked his head out of a dusty book and scooted about six inches to the left. “Depends on how you count it.”
“Usually by years,” you said. “One year for every three hundred and sixty-five days you spent breathing.”
“Then…” He appeared to be doing calculations in his head. “Say thirty-two.”
“Too old for me,” you told him with a laugh, pulling out your book and sinking to the floor next to him. Once, when you were young, your cousin’s friend had put an arm around you and said, “Nora, darling, I wish you were as old as you sound.” Your cousin had laughed in a way you did not understand; you understood it now.
“I thought you had a friend fighting,” he said.
“Not that kind of friend,” you said.
“You heard anything more?”
“No,” you said, and let the tips of your fingers brush against the outline of an envelope in your pocket. “He’s not required to write me.”
“Of course not,” Edmund said. He paused, and the words I don’t care if he writes me anyhow formed on your lips, and died before you spoke them. “I had a friend who stopped writing to me, once. We figured they were just into enemy territory and would get letters back as soon as they could.”
“What happened?” you asked, shutting your eyes and letting the words drift over you. “Did you keep writing to him?”
“Yeah, for a while. Then we got the news that he’d died.”
“What was his name?”
“Beaver,” he said.
You felt a shadow pass over the two of you, and you put an arm around Edmund’s trembling shoulder and felt him lean into you. “How’d it happen?”
“Ambush,” he said shortly, his breath stirring your hair. You ran your thumb in circles on his shoulder blade, let your fingers walk across his arm.
“I’m sorry.”
“It was a lifetime ago.”
The two of you sat there until the wind stopped, surrounded by the smell of musty books. The rain plunk-plunked on the roof and Edmund sniffled into your shirt, and you pretended like you couldn’t hear either and didn’t let the tears fall. When the shop girl started eying you suspiciously you pulled a book off the shelf and started to read: Brought through many lands and waters, I am here, brother, for these bleak sacrifices, to give you the last service of death and to speak in vain to mute ashes…
+
The fourth time you saw him was the beginning of the end, although you didn’t know it until later. It was two weeks since the storm, the sun warming your shoulders through your blouse and making you squint your eyes as you stared up through the branches of the apple tree. He snuck up behind you and you thought for a fleeting moment that you smelled salt. “Hello, Nora,” he said, and his voice was four notes deeper and came from somewhere above your head as you whirled around.
“Hello, Edmund,” you said, and your eyes lingered on his shoulders, suddenly broader, and his arms, too large for his shirt. “You’re older,” you said, stupidly. “How can you be older in two weeks?”
“I don’t think it’s about how many years you’ve breathed,” he said. “I think you were wrong about that.”
“Then what?”
“How old you feel.”
“How old do you feel?” you asked, ignoring the tightness across your chest when his fingers traced your cheek.
“Old enough.”
You kissed him in the shade of the tree, the smell of late apple blossoms wafting toward you on the wind, and he wrapped his arms around you as if he would never let go. When you broke to breathe he whispered, “Why are we in this world and not another, Nora?”
“To do what is right,” you said automatically, a lifetime of sermons and lectures ingrained into your mind. “To serve and glorify the Lord.”
“To get to know Him in this world,” Edmund agreed mournfully, and he pulled away from you. “Why would He come in the shape of a Lamb?”
“The Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world,” you said, although you had never thought of a literal lamb but of the metaphor, the sacrificial lamb, the blood spilled on the doors of the Israelites. Christ spilled his blood when they whipped him and washed away your sins, and in the end when you came in front of the throne you would be forgiven.
“I never asked for my sins to be taken away,” Edmund said, and you backed away. “I never wanted that. I never asked anyone to die in my place.”
“He had to die in order to rise again. It was His will,” you said, but Edmund just shook his head.
“Why write that into the Deep Magic? Why demand that a traitor be destroyed, unless an innocent died in his place? Why should betrayal demand a blood sacrifice?”
“I don’t understand,” you said, and fled, twigs cracking underfoot as you left him behind.
The telegram came for you that night.
+
The last time you saw him he looked like a child again, and you wondered if you had dreamed it all, the smell of the apple blossoms and the pressure of his hands on your waist, the desperation in his voice when he spoke against the God you loved. “Nora,” he said. “I hoped I would see you before we left.”
“Where are you going?” you asked. “I thought your parents were gone the whole summer.”
“A family friend invited us to stay for the rest of the month,” Edmund said. “It all happened very quickly. I think my aunt and uncle had something to do with it; they think we’re a bad influence on my cousin.”
“I thought you said your cousin was a prat,” you said, feeling oddly off-kilter as you spoke. It was not so much that you had missed a beat in the conversation, but rather a bar and a half.
“I suppose he was,” Edmund said, as if it took him a moment or two to remember. When he shook his head to clear it you felt as if he were clearing you out as well. “I won’t be back, I don’t think. But I—if you wanted to write,” he said, and handed you a folded sheet of paper.
“I’ll do that,” you said with a smile, knowing that you wouldn’t. “Goodbye, Edmund.”
That night you wore your oldest nightgown and brushed your hair until it shone, two hundred strokes, and you fixed yourself a warm mug of milk and sipped it slowly. You took the letters from under your pillow and smoothed them out, and then you slipped them, one by one, between the pages of a book you never read.
Let us go then, you and I, said the book when you shut it.
The page with Edmund’s address on it you folded twice and placed carefully under your pillow, in case you woke up in the night.
Original Prompt:
What I want:
- A scene describing what Caspian was thinking the first time he held Rillian.
- Adult Lucy as a knight, who fights alongside Peter and Edmund or/and Edmund and Lucy portrayed as best friends, equals, partners in crime who sneak off to explore. I will love you forever, if Lucy wears trousers in the fic.
- Reepicheep watching a sun rise for the last time.
- A story in the POV of some random person that tells of Lucy's coming of age party. This should focus solely on how beautiful, graceful and just plain great Lucy is in the eyes of this person, not how fabulous Susan is, because while Susan is fabulous Lucy needs a moment to shine. Make Lucy mature, please.
- An aged Susan looking back on her life, the people she's met, places she's gone and what not.
- A fic that is based around the song Already Gone by Sugerland. Characters: Edmund and an original OC of your making. No Mary Sues.
Prompt words/objects/quotes/whatever:
- Lady knight<
- “Love is something eternal; the aspect may change, but not the essence”
What I definitely don't want in my fic: slash, incest, Suspian, crossover, smut, Lucy being sidelined, acting sanctimonious or portrayed as a forever eight year old, graphic violence, Lucy being portrayed as a good cook.
no subject
Other things I love:
- how the talk of sacrifices is woven together with the WWII background -- eerie, but effective!
- the Catullus poem -- so fitting for the general mood of the fic
- this beautiful line (among many): The rain plunk-plunked on the roof and Edmund sniffled into your shirt, and you pretended like you couldn’t hear either and didn’t let the tears fall.
Thank you for writing this!
no subject