"you know, when you said you could sing, i just assumed you'd be bloody terrible. ever the surprise, o'callaghan."
[book 3 | can be read as standalone]
✳︎
she's his cousin's exchange student with a secret, and he's, well, a king of narnia (not a hig...
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☆○o。 。o○☆
Alice had realised that she and Edmund were dancing around some kind of inevitable truth.
She did not know what that truth was, per se, but when she had hugged him, and when she had apologised, something had been different.
Though Lucy and Caspian both knew her secret well enough - perhaps that made it no longer a secret, but the fact of the matter was the same - in that moment, she had not cared.
Not caring about the two people who knew her secret was a dangerous game, and Alice suspected she was not particularly talented at playing it. She felt their gazes all too keenly as they raked over her, strangely accusatory and worried, all at once.
It was a horrid feeling.
Though, Alice thought she could bear it. Edmund made it worthwhile, in some respects. Nonetheless, she found it oddly troubled that she could so easily dismiss the thing that held her chance at her voice - her chance at returning to who she had been, who she so desperately wish to return to being - in the balance.
It was enjoyable to be human for a time, Alice had realised, but if that time was in Narnia, it made it all the more redundant not to win her voice back. Narnia was her home. It would always be her home, and if Aslan did not have some twisted plan in store when he had summoned her back, she would have been surprised.
In the dusty morning light, the world seemed to be completely quiet. Holding its breath.
Still.
Even so, her mind came back to Edmund, and she cursed herself. In that moment earlier, when she had hugged him without a single care, Alice had felt free. That was a dangerous thing, in a world where she had never felt freedom before. Alice suspected it was a feeling she could wholly get used to, and she did not like that at all. It hardly helped that her thoughts seemed to wander to Edmund far more often than she would like them to.
Far more often.
She could not let some strange attraction get in her way.
It rather reminded her of a conversation she'd had with her mother once.
Her mother had always seemed to be the person who could tear her to shreds. Her father, he had been one for force, for beatings and lashings and blood which left sharks circling the halls outside her chamber for days.
But it was not her father's brute force that kept Alice awake at night, drove her from her bed on the night she had first truly spoken to Edmund.
It was her mother's voice.
Soft, and lilting, and awfully cruel, able to twist words to mean exactly what she wanted them to. She had always spoken as if they were the only two in the world, near whispering, even as her anger climbed and her temper built, she whispered.
