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"That's not how you spell frequently," Eustace muttered under his breath, scribbling out the word and spelling it again more carefully as the yellow electric lamp flickered overhead, its faint pinging hum invading his aching senses.
He sat back and rubbed his throbbing eyes, swallowing with a wince at the raw scratchiness still lingering at the back of his throat.
If anything, the head cold he'd been trying to ignore for the better part of a week was only intensifying with every night he spent hunched over his desk trying to finish homework that swam before his eyes.
He spun his pencil in pale, slender fingers and sighed as he scanned his latest attempt at coherent english: a few lines of sharp, slanting handwriting on an otherwise empty page, floating like foam atop the sea of abandoned essays.
"Dear Aunt Polly, thank you for the compliments, though I'm not sure I deserve them yet. I'm curious about the book you recommended, and to hear how your own writing is coming along.
I apologize if this letter is short, I have been ill rather frequently of late and schoolwork has been dull, so I—"
He snatched the page and crumpled it into a tight wad, tossing it into the bin as his shoulders convulsed with the involuntary shudder of a suppressed cough.
His pencil cluttered apathetically to the desk as he ran his fingers through his hair, pressing both palms hard into his eyes in an attempt to stem the pounding headache behind them.
One of his bunkmates snored.
A glance over his shoulder told him two of the boys with whom he shared his room had already passed out on their hard, flat mattresses. The third had apparently snuck out at some point—probably to his sister's room in the girls' building.
Curfew was at sundown, but Experiment House for all its improvements had not yet mastered the art of controlling students after hours.
In theory, sneaking out could get you expelled. But first they had to catch you, and of course they never did.
Eustace drew his hands down his face and pressed his comparatively cold fingers to his burning throat.
He sighed.
Ignoring the shiver that rushed through his body at the slightest movement, he stood quietly from his chair and aimed for the door, slipping noiselessly down the hall, expertly skipping every squeaky board down the stairs.
It wasn't as if he was going to get any sleep here, anyway.
He'd practiced this route countless times, even before Narnia, back when he'd gone running to the nearest authority figure at the faintest ache or pain, his soundless footsteps carrying him down to the dark kitchen where linoleum tiles reflecting dull grey moonlight from the ugly square window over the sink.
He turned the tap and bent to gulp down several mouthfuls of fresh well-water, easing his throat before splashing the icy cool water over his face, too.
The handle squeaked as he turned it off again, droplets trickling down his throat as he straightened and wiped his eyes and nose with the wrist of his sleeve.
Moonlight glinted off the squat faucet, the dark sky beyond a single pane of smudged glass streaked with a narrow stream of pale starlight against the rigid silhouette of the girls’ dormitory across the lawn.
He glanced over his shoulder into the silent hall.
Even the night watchman must be making his rounds in another building now, so absolute was the sense of emptiness pervading the lifeless shell of the ground floor.
Without waiting for this luck to change, Eustace crawled up onto the counter and unlatched the window pane, sliding it slowly open before hauling one leg over the edge, the sharp sill digging hard into his abdomen as he turned to drag his second leg through and dropped to the ground outside, damp grass freezing under bare feet.
The welcome chill of the night air brushed his skin, and he set off across the dark lawn—not toward the girls’ dorm, but down the length of his own building toward the squarish black void where the gym stood up against the glittering night sky, blotting out the stars one by one as he approached its towering bulk.
He rounded the brick wall at its far corner and plunged into the pitch black shadow of its overgrown pathway, the drip of damp leaves claiming him as soggy earth sank beneath his feet and numbed his toes, a gentle breeze rustling through the overhanging laurels.
He scrambled up the little hill by memory more than sight, grasping his way through dense bushes and scratching his palms on their jagged sinew in the dark, though his fingers were already too cold to feel much.
At last he struck the stone wall at the top and collapsed with his back against it, panting at the very edge of school grounds.
Nighttime noises flooded his senses, a chorus of crickets chirping from their invisible choir lofts among the damp leaves, the chilled air stinging at the back of his throat as if dragging icy claws up and down his windpipe, his head aching in that feverish, groggy way that made everything seem half dreamlike.
His hand moved habitually for his lighter, cool metal sliding between his fingers before he thought better of a cigarette.
That probably wouldn't do his throat any favors.
With a sigh, he flicked the lighter open pointlessly to a tiny burst of orange flame, casting strange shadows over glistening wet leaves before he snapped it shut again, repeating this action as he pressed his skull back against the stone wall.
Here at least he felt utterly separate from the school, separate from the monotony of yellow lamps and bins of half-written letters and the hollow company of people who might as well have been strangers for all they knew about him. Here in his little pocket of reality at least he could breathe, invisible to the sleeping world, wrapped in a darkness that could do no worse than ignore him, the familiar metal scrape and click of the lighter falling into a mechanical rhythm.
Here the loneliness didn't clash with the flattering words so beautifully penned in Aunt Polly's flowing hand, here that horrible empty ache seemed to belong, under the canopy of tiny, distant stars, so different from the brilliant Narnian sky he'd once learned to read better than any map in his own world.
The painful throbbing in his tender brain brought back echoes of crashing waves and creaking timbers, of dehydration in the days of water rationing on the Dawn Treader, the humid, sticky cabin air, and the dry patch at the back of his tongue.
What wouldn't he give to get back there, even to that miserable crew and rocking deck and taunting salt breeze? With Edmund and Caspian and Drinian only an arm's length away in their hammocks?
What wouldn't he give to be stuck in the freezing northern wilderness with Puddleglum's snoring and Pole's tossing and turning at his back?
What wouldn't he give even to be a dragon again? Coal black and hideous, perhaps, but warm and dry against the pouring rain as tiny human friends huddled against his sides like a rumbling furnace, sheltering under batlike wings as stories passed from one to the other like the most natural ritual in the world, a million leagues away from the sterile suffocation of England and everything that came with it.
"Scrubb?"
He stiffened at the low hiss of a word, so quiet that for a moment he almost thought he'd imagined it, but the faint crunch of leaves down in the overgrown pathway confirmed he hadn't quite crossed the threshold into hallucination yet.
“Pole,” he breathed, his tone near scolding as his heart pounded in belated surprise.
Branches snapped and leaves rustled, and a little breath of a curse came very near him as the girl struck a sharp branch, or perhaps sank a stockinged knee into the soggy undergrowth.
The next time he flicked his lighter open, it illuminated the grubby face of Jill Pole, short hair mussed from crawling through the bushes, school jacket hanging open over her cotton nightgown.
"What on earth are you doing here?"
"I saw you through the window," she murmured, picking her way to a spot beside him against the wall and drawing her knees up to her chest. "Figured it could only be you at this hour."
He shrugged, but coughed before he could speak, the force of it tearing at his raw throat, and the next sharp intake of cold air stung like smoke.
"I say, Scrubb, you sound awful. Are you still not feeling any better? I told you, you should've gone to the nurse this morning."
"I don't want to hear it," he snapped thickly.
A moment later, the venom in his tone caught up to him.
"Sorry," he muttered, and turned aside to cough into his arm again before leaning back against the wall.
Pole reached up to press a pair of cold fingers to his temple, and he turned sharply away from the touch, but she only settled back and crossed her arms.
“I suppose you're not going.”
Eustace snorted derisively.
“Well, I don't see why not.”
He bit his lip to restrain the bitter reply he so easily could have let slip in frustration, and the chill in the air seemed to thicken between them.
A long silence passed before Pole spoke again. "Was that Aunt Polly's letter that came today?"
He hummed in affirmation, sore throat constricting with the noise.
"What did she say?"
"I don't want to talk about it."
"What— was it something bad?"
"I just don't want to talk about it. I don't want to talk about anything. I want to be alone."
"No, you don't."
"I really think I do."
"I know I never want to be alone when I'm feeling poorly."
"Well, have you ever considered that maybe I'm not you?"
"That's clear enough," she spat. "I only came out here to check on you, but I suppose I'll leave you to catch your death, if that's what you really want."
"I'm fine."
"You are not fine, Eustace Clarence, what you are is an idiot."
"Don't call me that."
"Well you are being an idiot, I can't—"
"Eustace Clarence. Don't call me that."
Pole's voice caught mind-sentence.
He could only just make out the shape of her face in the dim grey patches between shadows to which his eyes had adjusted, staring back at him with a shiny glint of pale moonlight.
"Oh."
He averted his eyes, a bounce of flame from his lighter searing purple spots into his vision.
"I didn't mean to—”
He shook his head and rolled his eyes, swallowing with a wince before taking a deep, shaky breath. "Aunt Polly said she liked the map I sent.”
"You don't have to tell me."
"You asked. That's what she said. She liked it and she said I have a real eye for detail, and she's sending me an old book on traditional cartography, and that's it."
“That…” A lilt of confusion laced Jill Pole's voice. "That sounds good.”
"I never said it was bad."
"Scrubb, you sound like you're going to cry."
"Maybe I am,” he snapped. "I'm not exactly myself right now, if you hadn't noticed. I came out here to get away." He arched his throat and pressed his skull hard into the stone wall, as if it would crush his headache, stars glittering down through the narrow gap between the wall and the gym.
The little silver pinpricks pulsed along to his heartbeat, listing ever so slightly with the spinning in his head.
“I'm sorry,” muttered Pole. "I didn't mean to invade your privacy.”
She shifted from her spot and slipped down into the bushes with a soft rustle before Eustace squeezed his eyes shut, everything inside him trembling with a fresh surge of regret.
"Wait."
She stopped.
Shame and embarrassment crashed like an icy wave through his frayed nervous system, threatening to turn his stomach as his fingers tightening around the silver lighter.
For a moment he racked his mind for some excuse, some explanation, but none came.
The brush rustled as Pole returned to her spot beside him. "What's going on?”
He swallowed, winced, eyes fluttering open, the tiny burst of flame between his fingers flicking on again, off again.
"Is it your mum?"
He glanced sharply at her, for a moment pulling his head away from the wall.
“Oh, don’t look so surprised.” She snatched the lighter, flicking it open and letting the flame bounce between them. "Isn't it always your mum, with this thing?"
He snatched it back, but couldn't contradict the point, turning the well-worn tool over in his fingers, still itching to reach for a cigarette, too, the agitation buzzing under his skin.
"Did she say something?"
Eustace shook his head, flicking the light open, grimacing a faint wry smile. "You know she doesn't call."
"I just thought— you know… you've probably been ill three different times since term started. They do have to write home about that sort of thing."
“Not if you don’t go to the nurse.”
Pole blinked, her confusion reflected in the flickering wick of flame that danced like a tantalizing fairy-light in her huge brown eyes. “You haven’t been going so that your parents won’t hear about it?”
He flicked the lighter shut.
“But… why? Surely they can’t hold it against you, I mean— you can’t help that you’re sick.”
Eustace sighed. “You don’t understand.”
“So tell me.”
He shook his head. “Alberta… She’ll try to come and baby me, or have me sent home, and I just don’t want to think about it, alright?”
“Well… that’s not so bad. I mean, I know you’re too old for it, but it’s only natural that she would be concerned. Gosh, Scrubb, I thought something was really wrong.”
Eustace suppressed a cough, shoulders shuddering before he drew a measured breath. “Like I said. You don’t understand.”
“I want to,” said Pole, though her tone was a little awkward now, as if she thought she were talking to a madman. Not so very unlike the tone she’d taken with Rilian before he’d been set right again. “I just don’t see what’s so wrong with your mother caring about you.”
“She doesn’t care about me, she only cares if I’m sick.”
The words burst out before he could bite them back, loud and abrupt against the stifled blanket of half-whispers under which they’d been hiding until now, poisonous vitriol ricocheting off the wall, ringing in his ears, ringing in the icy air, reducing him to another fit of coughing as his sore brain pounded behind his eyes, but for once the rush of adrenaline dulled the pain.
“I’m sure that’s not true,” murmured Pole, too softly; too stiffly; an octave too high and infuriatingly conciliatory. “Even if she is rather a beast sometimes.”
“How would you know?” spat Eustace, and he thought he felt her recoil. “I’m the idiot who went running to her over every little measly thing, don’t you think I’d know it by now? That I didn’t exist unless there was something wrong with me? That it was like all of a sudden she remembered she had a kid? I know perfectly well it was all she talked about, to her friends and to the grocer and to the man at the drugstore. She was so bloody proud of my being fragile, like it made her so… so evolved. So understanding. And everybody else thought so, too, or at least they certainly made a show of flocking around her to offer their sympathies, like— like I was some kind of invalid!”
A lump surged unbidden into his throat and he tried to swallow it down again to no avail, eyes stinging as that hollow feeling carved its way deeper into his chest, heart pounding so violently he wondered whether Pole couldn't hear it.
“That… that doesn't… I mean, you were a bit of a baby about everything, but that doesn't mean—”
“You're not even listening.”
“Of course I am, I just think that maybe—”
“Well, quit it, will you? I’ve spent enough time thinking about it. I know I must have liked the attention at some point, but after Narnia— after everything— My own mother quit speaking to me for weeks when she realized I didn’t want to play along anymore, and I didn’t even care. You’re supposed to care, Pole, it’s supposed to hurt, and it didn’t, because nothing really changed, did it? When did she ever care about what I liked? When has she ever asked what I thought about something?”
Pole said nothing. He couldn't make out her expression. Perhaps he didn't want to.
“She hates this—us—all of it, the Pevensies, Aunt Polly, the Professor, she says I was such an intelligent child and she doesn’t know where I went wrong, but the instant I catch a cold it’s all fussing and phone calls and lemon water and steam baths, like nothing ever happened, and sometimes I think— I think if she could have used one of the Green Witch’s spells, she would have.”
“Scrubb!”
“What? That's what she really wanted, isn’t it? A doll, not a son.”
“I think— maybe you were right, you're not yourself right now, I shouldn't have brought it up. You already feel poorly enough as it is, what you really need is sleep.”
He almost laughed, but the twisted sound only came out in a choked little cough. “You think I'm saying this because I'm tired?”
“You'd never say it if you weren't.”
“Maybe not, but it's true, I'm not crazy.”
“I never said you were crazy.”
“Really? Because you sure know how to make a chap feel like he's losing his mind.”
“I—”
“Why are you even here if you're just going to contradict everything I say? I'm only trying to tell you—”
“I'm sorry, okay?” she snapped, and then lowered her voice guiltily. “I'm sorry, I don't know what else to do, you're— you're scaring me a little.”
“Well, now you know why I wanted to be alone.”
“But you don't.”
Eustace scoffed and shook his head, rubbing his eyes until sparks danced in his vision, drawing a deep, shaky breath, and letting it out again. “No,” he admitted after a long stretch of hollow silence. “I don't.”
Pole's feet shifted in the brush as she drew her knees up to her chest. A minute later, she murmured “I didn't mean to argue. I just… I don't know how to imagine a mother so— well… I always sort of figured she was rude, and a bit stuck up, but not…” She hesitated, sighed, and when at last she spoke again her voice came out stiff and awkward. "She— she must have loved you… somehow, in her own—"
“Please don't tell me that was love.” Eustace swallowed painfully. His own voice was subdued now. He didn’t have the energy to shout anymore. “Maybe she cared, once, whatever that's worth. Maybe she still cares, if you really want to call it that. But it's not the same. You can't tell me that was love, not now. I've stared Love in the face and it didn't look a thing like her."
The girl at his side said nothing.
Eustace’s heart pounded dully as a flush of heat pricked at the backs of his eyes, gaze fixed blankly on an arbitrary point in the darkness, cricket-song filling the void.
Silence stretched between them.
A disgusting sense of vulnerability churned in his gut, and he could only thank the Lion for the shroud of darkness that hid his face just as it hid Pole's, though her unseen stare pierced him all the same.
He took a half-breath and glanced up into the glimmering belt of stars scattered over the desolate, cold world. Their distant winking settled like ice in his chest, and he pressed his head back against the rough stone of the wall. “Do you ever miss them?” he murmured at last. “The Narnian stars?”
For a moment only silence answered. Pole shifted beside him, leaning back against the wall as if to gaze up into the sky for herself. "Yes," she said hesitantly. "Sometimes. But they're beautiful here, too."
"They are.” He blinked the blurry globes back into brilliant specks, so much smaller than those he'd once lived by so far away in another world. “I suppose I just don't know how to look at them without thinking of the ones I learned first.”
Pole’s invisible eyes turned to fix on him again. “You’re talking in riddles.”
Was he?
The spinning haze of exhaustion blurred his thoughts together, tangling his frustration with those icy, winking lights, weaving some vague terror into the fabric of the black canopy from which they hung, mocking, as if they understood. As if they knew that Pole didn’t.
Perhaps he was talking in riddles.
“I do that, don’t I?”
Pole hummed softly, watching him; concern mixed with expectation in her stilted breath.
The night air hung with an empty stillness, and for a moment he could almost have believed they were camped on some desolate cliff in the mountains of the North, sheltering under a wild hedge, or perhaps in the wind-weathered remains of a giantish ruin—worlds away from Experiment House, from stiff, grey England, where the hot saltwater blur in his eyes wouldn’t have been girlish or shameful.
“I’m afraid Aunt Polly will be like Alberta.”
Pole gave a very faint “oh.”
“I don’t mean she isn’t kind,” he amended quickly, “or brilliant, or anything like that. She’s as good as a boy with maps, even Edmund would have to admit that, and she’s about as far away as you could hope to get from stuffy or stuck up. I know she isn’t really like Alberta, but… ” He let out a shuddering breath and shook his head. “What if she only likes me because I tell her what she wants to hear?”
Pole shifted toward him, the air displaced by her hand just barely ghosting his arm, hovering there, hesitating for a moment before withdrawing again, leaving a cold patch in its wake.
Her breath stuttered, as if she’d second guessed her words, too, before at last she only said “What does she want to hear?”
Eustace shrugged. “I don’t know. We’ve only really talked about our adventures, so far, and… maybe it’s stupid, I just… What if that’s all she really wants?”
“Doesn’t she ever ask how you’ve been? About school?”
“Sure, but grown-ups have to say those sorts of things.”
Pole sighed, and Eustace almost thought he detected a hint of a smirk in her voice when she spoke again. “Scrubb, do you really think Polly Plummer has ever done a thing in her life just because grown-ups do it?”
“I… Well, I suppose not.”
“Do you think she would ever say something she didn’t mean?”
Eustace bit his lip in silence.
He really did feel stupid, when she put it like that.
“Nevermind,” he muttered, “I don't know why I said anything.”
“No, you do, and you had every reason to, but Aunt Polly isn’t Alberta. You’ve heard the way your cousins talk about her, all those trips with the Professor—could Alberta have done anything like that?”
Eustace scoffed, and even despite the swell of humiliation threatening to swallow him whole, the faintest of reluctant, wry smirks tugged at his lips. “Of course not.”
“See?”
He sighed. “You make it sound so simple.”
“It is.”
Nothing had ever felt further from simple. Until a few moments ago he hadn’t even been able to put words to the jumbled mess of uncomfortable thoughts clashing in his own head every time he slipped into a more casual tone with his letters—every time he strayed into saying something about himself, every time he even tried to mention he’d been ill. He’d never quite been able to put a name to the sinking, sick, pathetic feeling it gave him, as if he were a small child again, blubbing about some imagined bruise for the sweets and attention that would follow.
“Have you ever thought anything like that about me?” asked Pole abruptly.
“Like what?”
She shifted a little. “Like… if I only liked you for selfish reasons.”
“Of course not.”
“No?”
“I already know you can’t stand me.”
Pole scoffed in protest, and Eustace smirked in spite of himself. He could picture her expression of pouty remonstration only too clearly, thin brows knit almost comically over dark brown eyes that were only too skilled at sulking through the curtain of her bangs.
“Well…” The effort to regain her train of thought played in her voice. “What about Edmund? Or Peter?”
He shook his head. “I know how they acted when we didn’t get along, so they wouldn’t be able to hide it now.”
“Caspian?”
“I… well, no.”
“There you are, then, it’s no different with Aunt Polly.”
Eustace didn’t answer. Because if he asked why it felt so different, somehow that would be crossing a line that even his most fever-addled mind could not excuse speaking aloud. He knew perfectly well why it felt so different, whether he admitted it to himself or not.
“You know I’m right,” said Pole primly.
He sighed.
She wasn’t going to let him off easy.
A weak, half-hearted smile twitched at Eustace's lips, but his knotted insides still refused to untangle themselves. “I know.”
Another long silence passed before Pole spoke again.
"I am glad Aunt Polly started writing."
Eustace hummed reluctantly. "Me too."
"Shame we can't give the school line out to anyone but family. It would be nice to really talk to her. Wouldn't it be handy if she was our real aunt?"
He glanced over to Pole’s shadow in the dark. "You don't have to keep talking just to cheer me up."
"Who says that's what I'm doing?"
"Your voice gets higher when you're trying to think of things to say."
"Well, I'm sorry I don't want to leave you out here alone on a night like this, feeling as poorly as you are, I don't care what you say."
He smirked, and this time it was nearly in earnest.
A tiny burst of firelight illuminated the space between them as he flicked the lighter open again, casting a twinkling starscape over the droplets of dew shivering on laurel leaves and between the silken strands of spider’s webs, the two brightest points of which flickered in Pole’s eyes.
"One might think you were trying to get sick."
She crossed her arms. “What does that mean you’re doing, then?”
“I’m already sick.”
"Yes, and this isn't helping." She motioned broadly into the cool night air.
He glanced around, leaning back against cold stone even as it leached the last of the heat from his body. "I like it, though."
"The cold?"
"The wall."
Pole turned to glance up at it as if she hadn't even really thought about it. The thoroughly uninteresting grey brick of the school perimeter, beyond which lay only empty heath, and beyond that perhaps the glimmering lights of town, though they'd never seen them. It seemed a lonely place, perhaps, to anyone who didn't know real magic had once shattered it into a thousand pieces—that a golden Lion had once settled in its midst under their dull grey English sky, and that for a moment another world had lain beyond; one of brilliant greens and of towering trees and birds the colors of jewels singing the songs of a world beyond the end of worlds.
And even in the dark, in the cold, under a sky of unfamiliar stars, he still felt closer here to that magic if only for the reminder that it had been real, like the painting in his spare room at home, or how indeed his cousins must have felt about the wardrobe at the Professor's old house in the country.
"I suppose I can allow that," said Pole softly.
He smirked. "Thank you, I'm glad you approve."
Unbidden, he thought of Aunt Polly’s letters. Their flowing script, beautiful yet almost haphazard in their swift lines, as if she wrote every word in such a flurry of eagerness to get the next that one could only imagine she hardly kept up with the flow of her own thoughts. The descriptions of places she’d visited in her youth over which Peter had ruled as High King nearly a thousand years later, the questions she’d never yet discovered the answers to, the longing evident in every stroke of the name Aslan.
They gave him very nearly the same feeling that the wall did—that closeness to magic, a connection to the world beyond, no matter how mundane it may have seemed to anyone else. Words on a page, yet within them the mind of another who carried the stories nobody else would believe.
A reminder of a place he couldn’t go back to, yet.
Or perhaps two places.
One of them had simply never been safe to begin with.
But couldn’t it be, with her?
A long silence passed during which he had evidently fallen back to clicking the lighter open and closed without realizing.
“Scrubb?”
“Mm?” The lighter clicked shut again.
"I— er, no, actually, nevermind, I shouldn't have thought about it."
"Just spit it out, Pole."
"Well…” She hesitated. “That thing you said about Love. Do you… do I look anything like…?"
The corner of his mouth quirked at the awkwardness in her voice, and he shifted a leaf with his foot as he breathed out, muttering softly but not quite inaudibly. "Yeah."
"Okay."
Again the ghost of a smirk tugged at his lips.
How else would he have had anything to compare Alberta to? If it weren’t for Pole’s pestering attention, Edmund’s wordless understanding, Peter’s warmth, the blaze of Lucy’s smile; even Susan’s comfortable cordiality. And now, not least of all, Aunt Polly’s honest and uncomplicated support of the interests Alberta had never once acknowledged.
Perhaps it was little wonder he didn’t know what to do with himself. Not for their similarities, but their differences.
"Because I do, you know. Not just care, I mean."
"I know." He glanced at her in the dark, the faintest silver gleam of England's pale stars scattered in her eyes. "Me too."