Fourteen
I feel a heartbeat, deep down in the roots, and know you're here with me, somewhere in these woods.
- Shadow Tree, Lanie's Willow
Come with me, and we'll be in a world of pure imagination.
- Pure Imagination, Superhuman
It is cold.
That is the first thing Cassiopeia notices, as she lies there on the ground, alive and not quite believing that she is. It is cold, the kind of cold that creeps into your bones and sinks into your heart and permeates your very soul until you are no longer certain that you have felt anything resembling warmth.
What is warmth? She is already forgetting.
Edmund knows that feeling far more intimately than he would care to admit to anyone who is not his sibling. He knows that cold, knows how it sinks into your limbs and creeps into your heart and twines with your soul until you no longer know where the cold ends and you begin. (He can still feel it, sometimes. He knows that Cassiopeia can too. Winter lives in their bones, and they will never be fully rid of it.)
The students of Hogwarts look to Cass in confusion. How is this possible? How can she be in Hogwarts one moment and somewhere else in a heartbeat? (How did they never know? How did no one notice?) (How long was she gone for?)
The cold is comforting, in a way. It is a blanket in which one can wrap oneself, a numbness that convinces one it would be so much better to just lie down and rest. She almost gives in, almost closes her eyes and drifts off into the darkness that beckons her so welcomingly, but something stops her. An emptiness inside of her, a question she has been asking herself since Harry (don't think about Harry) since her friend (were they ever really friends?) since he called her a monster and left. (He said he wouldn't leave why did he leave, why do they always leave why can no one just stay for once WHY CAN'T THEY STAY-) (Stop. Breathe. Don't think about it.)
Draco-Ginny-Luna-Neville see their friend (their leader, their deity) lying on the ground. They see her eyes drifting closed, see her face blank in absence of the fury she has known her whole life, see the defeat that weighs heavy on her limbs. They see her grief, they see her devastation, they see her betrayal.
And they mourn.
They mourn for the girl who believed her first friend would always be there for her. They mourn for the girl who has been pushed and pushed and pushed until she broke. (Until she had to pick up her own broken pieces. Until she had to learn to put herself together from the shards she was left with.) They mourn for their friend, who they were not there for when she needed them. (They did not have much choice. They did not choose to leave her when she needed them most.) (It was not their choice, but they mourn as if it was.)
(Where is your fury, Cassiopeia Adhara?)
It is a question that haunts her, taunts her, stops her from drifting into that beckoning darkness. It is a question that demands an answer, an explanation. It is a question that refuses to be ignored.
She remembers that moment, that moment where her fury chose to desert her. She remembers the numbness, the aching emptiness left where once her anger had nestled behind her ribcage. It was a hollow feeling. (Without her fury, she felt like a ghost of a girl.) (Never has she felt so hollow as she did in that moment.)
There is something wrong about seeing Cass without her fury, everyone in the hall agrees. It is an intrinsic part of her, a brightness that shines in her eyes, a weapon that adds jagged edges to an already broken smile. Her fury is visible in every word, in every action, in every breath. To see her looking so numb, so defeated, makes it feel as though the entire world has been knocked off of its axis. Cass is a force of nature, her fury even more so - without it, she is like an ocean with no water, a forest that has no trees.
Cassiopeia pushes herself up with shaking arms, frowns as she spits her numbness onto the ground in front of her, feeling her emotions creep back into the empty space inside of her. Her fury reignites, first an ember and then a spark and then a flame, and now she remembers warmth. (Her fury is warmth, and she is made of fury. How could she not know this feeling? It has been with her since the day she was born.)
"That's my sister," Peter laughs as he sees her spit out her numbness, her grief. He looks at her, and she smiles at him, and there is fury lighting up her gaze, and he laughs to see it. (She has always been the angriest of the siblings; where Susan is calculating and Peter is protective and Lucy is feral and Edmund is cold, she burns with fury the likes of which the world has never seen before.) (They would not have it any other way.)
"That's my daughter," Sirius repeats Peter's phrase (with a slight alteration) in a whisper, and there is a longing in his tone that his husband does not miss. Remus grips his husband's hand tightly, but Sirius ignores the comfort offered by the feel of his lover clinging to him. (He does not deserve this comfort. Not after all the mistakes he has made.) He blinks back tears as he stares at the screen, and he hates that Cass has inherited his anger, his fury, but he cannot deny that it suits her better than it ever did him. (He let his fury become poison. She lets her fury become love.)
She looks around, ignoring the brightness that threatens to blind her, ignoring the light that calls her name in a language she cannot yet speak. She blinks, shakes her head, looks again. Her surroundings have not changed, or rather they have changed too much, and that is what she cannot understand. She was somewhere (she remembers Ginny, or rather not-Ginny, dragging her. She remembers cold, but a wet cold, not this soul-aching numbness) and now she is somewhere else.
She was somewhere, and now she is Elsewhere.
Minerva wonders how this is possible. She wonders how Cass disappeared so easily, how none of them noticed the missing student. (What if other students have disappeared? Ones less angry, ones less powerful, ones less likely to survive?) (Minerva may not like it, but Cass is a survivor. Nothing in this world can kill the girl, not if the girl does not wish to die. It makes the professor shamefully grateful that it was Cass, and no one else, who disappeared into this new world.)
She wonders whether to ask Cass, if there is any way for other students to disappear into this other land, if they must do their best to contain whatever magic allowed this travel from one world to another. (And there is no doubt in Minerva's mind that this is another world; she has not seen Cass look that at home anywhere on Earth.) But then the woman looks at Cass, and sees the girl already looking at her, and there is a heavy quality to the girl's gaze that has the professor's words drying up in her mouth. Cass shakes her head, ever-so-slightly, and Minerva knows it is an answer to a question she never managed to ask; there is no way into this other world, not one that any of the students can access. (She does not doubt that Cass knows ways to get to the other land; she is starting to see that there is nothing the girl cannot do.)
Elsewhere is strange. The air has a quality to it that is almost like silk, and with each breath she feels better than she has in her life. Sound travels strangely, too, the quiet groans of the forest and near-silent sound of falling snow echoing in her ears, with an undercurrent of something that sounds almost like a language she cannot speak. (Not yet. But she will learn.) And there is something tugging at her magic, a sense of incompleteness, something that entwines itself with her magic and whispers that it could be so much more.
She is no longer on Earth, that much is clear. (What is Earth? Already, the memory is fading, replaced with a vague sense of fear-pain-anger-grief-numbness.) (Faces flash in her memory, red hair and freckles and blue eyes and sunlight hair. She clings to them with all her might; she can not, will not, forget them. She has lost too much already.)
Her friends panic a little, when they see how easy it might have been for Cass to forget about them. They see how her memories of Earth are already fading, see how she does not care enough to hold onto the reminders of this world, and they panic. (What if they witness her forgetting about them?) (They know she will never forget about them. They know this. But it would have been so easy for her to forget about them, and that terrifies them.)
(What would they have been without her?)
Cass sees this, and it takes her but a moment to extricate herself from the pile of limbs her siblings have entangled her in. She slides to the floor and immediately, all her friends turn to her. Draco, ever sensitive to the threat of losing what little family he has left, lays his head in her lap and hides his face in her stomach so no one will see the tears that escape his eyes. (He would not survive if Cass forgot about him. He would die the moment his face faded from her memory, the moment she looked at him and saw a stranger.) Neville, almost as terrified as Draco at the thought of losing his first true friend, leans against Cass' back and rests his head on her shoulder, taking deep breaths so that he might not burst into tears. (If she forgot who he was, he would break, but he would break in private. No one would know how broken he was, but he would never be able to heal.) Luna cuddles into Cass' side, curling as close to her as humanely possible, shoulders shaking and panicked breaths escaping her at the thought of her first friend, her dearest friend, not knowing the story they have written together. (If Cass forgot the story of their friendship, Luna would shatter. She would shatter into a million pieces, and nothing would ever be enough to put her back together.) Ginny curls into Cass' other side, clings to her hand as though the other girl will disappear the moment she lets go. (Cass is the first person who Saw her, truly and properly. If she ever forgets Ginny, the redhead will make sure everyone sees her. She will burn herself to ashes, making sure no one can forget her again.)
Cass soothes them as much as she can, runs a hand through Draco's hair, curls into Neville's weight on her back, rests a head on top of Luna's and grips Ginny as tightly as the redhead holds onto her. She murmurs reassurances and promises into their ears, swears she will never forget them. She does not blame them for reacting this way; she would too, has reacted this way upon thinking they might forget about her. (This is what happens when a friend group is so close they need each other more than they need to breathe.)
("Codependency," Hermione Granger sniffs from somewhere to the side, and Cass barely withholds a growl. This bushy-haired menace knows nothing of what they have been through, knows nothing of the trauma all of them carry.) (She will pay. Cass will make them all pay, more than they already have.)
Cassiopeia gets to her feet slowly, her limbs shaking, although she cannot be sure whether the tremors are from lingering terror of Slytherin's creature or the cold that still attempts to burrow beneath her skin. She casts a warming charm (it doesn't help much) and wraps her magic around her (a cloaking, an act of hiding, although she doesn't know it yet) and begins to walk forwards, not knowing where she is going but determined to explore this new world, wondering what she will find. (Wondering if there is a way back. Wondering if she would want to go back at all if she did not have four friends waiting for her.)
It hurts the students of Hogwarts, more than anyone thought it would, to know that were it not for her friends Cass would likely never have returned to the castle.
They know it is different now, of course they do. She has left, many times, but she has always come back to them. (She has always returned to her followers.) There are been many times she could have left them behind, many instances in which she could have given all of them up. (They thought she would, in the beginning, and then she refused any deal offered to her, any bargain made with the purpose of removing her from the school.) They have her loyalty, they know this, they have her loyalty because she has theirs. (She has never been one to abandon her people in times of need.)
But still, it hurts to know that she only truly began to care when she came back. (Granted, they did not give her many reasons to care about them.) It hurts to know that their leader very almost abandoned them altogether.
(They see her smile at her siblings, and know that they would not begrudge her abandonment if it meant her joy.)
She does not know how long she walks for. It seems time loses all meaning in Elsewhere, minutes stretching into days that condense into seconds. She stops feeling the cold at some point, arms drifting from where they were wrapped around her for warmth, leaving her exposed to the bitter winter chill and yet not uncomfortable in the slightest. (Already, she is Changing. This is what Elsewhere does, it takes and changes and creates until no one is sure of what they originally were.) She loses her shoes, too, somewhere in the snow, or perhaps they lose her, perhaps they are wandering around searching for the human whose feet they once adorned. The thought makes her giggle, a lively sound that seems out of place in this dark forest she has found herself in. Pausing for a moment in her wandering (how long has she been walking?) Cassiopeia idly thinks she might be going mad. (Or maybe she went mad a long time ago. Maybe she dreamed up a place called Earth, and has always been in Elsewhere. Maybe the people whose faces she clings to never existed at all. Wouldn't that be funny?)
And now Cassiopeia is laughing, properly laughing like she feels she hasn't laughed in years. She is laughing, head tipped back to the sky, snow settling on her cheeks and eyelashes and hair, and for a single moment, the entire world seems to stand still.
Sirius frowns when he sees this laughter, this sudden strike of madness. It reminds him uncomfortably of Bellatrix-Walburga-himself. He begins to wonder if perhaps, he has passed down more to his daughter than his hair, than his eyes, than his fury. (He watches his daughter laugh, and thinks she looks far too much like a person going insane.) (Oh Sirius Black, didn't you know? Your daughter went mad a long time ago.)
Narcissa smiles when she hears the laughter bursting out of Cass' mouth. She smiles, and there are tears in her eyes as she looks at the black-haired girl cackling her amusement in a snow-covered forest. (Unlike Sirius, she does not find herself reminded of Bellatrix or Walburga. Or rather, she does, but only in that she looks at Cass and sees everything that they could have been.)
And then there is a quiet gasp from behind her, and Cassiopeia's laughter cuts off abruptly, spinning around to see what new thing Elsewhere has decided to show her.
From a thick copse of trees, a young girl stares at her.
Several people in the hall choke on their spit, heads snapping towards where the Pevensies lounge, eyes catching upon the auburn-haired youngest Pevensie draped across the laps of her elder siblings. They stare at her, stare at the child that has now appeared on the wall, understanding who the child is before any name is mentioned, and yet remaining confused nonetheless.
How has she changed so much from the child she once was?
There are similarities, of course. Lucy's hair is the same shade of auburn it has always been (although it has a tendency to glow when the light hits it, glow in a way that is not quite normal). Her eyes are as blue as they were in her childhood (they have only become more blue as the years pass; looking into her eyes is looking into the depths of every source of water in the world. It is endless and infinite and overwhelming, and decidedly strange).
But there are differences, too. She wears her hair wild now, loose curls spilling over her shoulders in a way they never did when she was young. (Feathers are braided into her hair, and stones have been woven among the strands, and flowers peek out of the curls. Gifts from her followers, from her friends, from her devotees. Things she cannot bare to part from.) Her nails are sharp. (Claws, not nails.) Her teeth are sharper than they have ever been. (All the better to bite you with, my dear.)
When she was a child, Lucy was not innocent, but she looked it.
She is grown now, and she is dangerous, and she looks it.
(It is understandable that they are confused, these people who have seen who the child on the wall is. Lucy is no longer the cub with milk teeth and unsharpened claws; she has fangs and she has claws, and she is willing to show them to the world.)
Lucy Pevensie wanders into Narnia, a child.
Lucy Pevensie wanders into Narnia, a child without a home, a child seeking a place where her siblings might be happy. Because her siblings aren't happy, not in the world where blood spills so easily and war destroys everything it touches and innocence dies a little more with each life lost. They hide it from her, of course. Peter hugs her (a touch too tightly, a touch too desperately) and Susan smiles (a brittle smile, a smile that will crack at the slightest touch) and Edmund scowls when she walks into a room (but cries at night because his little sister has never known anything but war). They hide it from her, but Lucy knows. (She has always known things she shouldn't.) And Lucy is not a selfless being (although some may name her thus, mistaking love for selflessness; love is selfishness, she knows that, but few others seem to); her siblings are hers, hers in a way that no one else is, and she wants them to be happy, because they aren't happy and they are drifting apart and they are not allowed to leave her, to leave each other.
Harry wonders what it must be like, to love someone so much you would abandon everything you have ever known if it means that they would be happy. Would you hate that person, at some point, for being loved so much you gave up a world to make them happy? Or would you continue to love them, because that is all you can do, because nothing could ever make you love them less? (You should know the answer to this, Harry Potter. Did your once-friend first-friend not leave behind the only place she might have called home so that you would not be alone at Hogwarts? Did she not love you ardently until you gave her no more reasons to?)
And so Lucy Pevensie wanders into Narnia, a child without a home, a child seeking a place where her siblings might be happy, a child with claws not yet sharpened and teeth that have not yet grown in.
She does not know it is called Narnia when she first finds it, of course. She knows it is Other, can feel the shiver of Something as she passes from the confines of the wardrobe into the snowy forest of the Other place. She does not know it is called Narnia, but something in her soul settles slightly, and she knows that this is the place she has been looking for, the place that all her siblings can be happy.
There is something about this Elsewhere that has Albus Dumbledore's skin crawling. He feels unsettled, wrong, unnerved in the way prey might be when they are being stalked by a predator. He feels uncannily as though he is being hunted, although by what he could not say. (Five pairs of eyes turn towards him. In the front of the hall, unseen by others, the Pevensie siblings smile; they are the smiles of hunters.)
She almost turns around to fetch them right that instant. Then she hears someone laughing, and the sound hooks her like a fish on a fishing line, has her walking forwards until she is brushing past a branch and can see the person who is laughing.
She gasps without meaning to, and the laughter abruptly ceases.
The girl (is she a girl?) who had been laughing spins around, and although Lucy feels she must say something, she finds her words stolen from her mouth before they can form. She gazes at this girl (this apparition, this creature), takes in the sight of bare feet and bare arms, of snow-dusted hair and snow-covered shoulders. (Surely this cannot be a girl. No human would survive this cold without a coat.) (No human could be so enchantingly beautiful.)
Cass smiles at her sister, and Lucy smiles back, and the rest of the siblings cannot withhold their laughter. Of course Lucy has known Cass is not human since the moment they met. (Lucy has always known things that she shouldn't.)
Remus Lupin knows his daughter is human. (Do you know this, Remus Lupin? Are you sure you know this to be a truth?) And yet, watching the younger form of his daughter laugh in the middle of a snow-covered forest, he cannot fault the Pevensie child for wondering if Cass had any human blood in her veins; he cannot deny there is a feeling of Otherness that surrounds his daughter. (She looks as though she belongs there, doesn't she, Remus Lupin? You see it, but you don't want to admit it. She looks like she belongs there, more than she has ever belonged in this reality.)
When Lucy's words come back to her, the first sentence to tumble out of her mouth is, "you're pretty." She blushes, then, and the other girl seems to soften slightly, taking careful steps forward until she is kneeling in front of Lucy. The younger girl tilts her head, and asks the question that has been sitting on the tip of her tongue since she saw this new person. "Are you human?"
The girl laughs, and Lucy flushes at the sound. It is not a kind sound (she sees this girl's teeth flash and thinks that maybe nothing about this girl is kind) (the thought bothers her less than it should) but it wraps itself around Lucy, a hug from which she never wants to be freed.
"As far as I am aware, I am mostly human," the girl winks at Lucy, who giggles slightly. Then the girl holds out a hand, and Lucy shakes it, and the air around them seems to shiver for a moment. "I am called Cassiopeia. What are you called?"
People murmur a little, at the answer which is also a non-answer. (Cass excels in giving those kinds of answers.) (Of course she does, she is fae-touched and fae-raised.)
"What do you mean, mostly human?" A student calls out, a little first-year Slytherin that sits not too far from where the Pevensies lounge. (He is smarter than most would give him credit for; he has seen the power shift, and has changed positions accordingly. Now he does not sit by the teachers for protections; now he sits by Cass and looks to her for leadership.)
"We're wixen," Cass replies, shrugging as much as she can with all of her friends still clinging to her. She glances back at the student, catches his eyes and offers a smile full of mysteries. "We have magic in our veins. How much magic must be in our bodies before we are no longer human at all?"
(She hears the Ravenclaws cloister together, and she laughs lightly. She knows her students (and they are her students, there is no doubt about that), she knows that they will obsess over this mystery. She wonders what they will find.) (She wonders what they will think when they hear what she is, when they see what she became.)
Lucy shares her name, and the girl (Cassiopeia, that is what she said her name was) smiles at the younger girl as she climbs to her feet. She stretches out a hand, and Lucy takes it without a moment's hesitation, because she is alone and it is cold and somehow she knows that this girl will not harm her.
Then, as they begin to walk forwards, towards a lamp post Lucy has not noticed before, there is a loud yelp from behind them. They spin around, Cassiopeia shoving Lucy behind her, Lucy clinging to Cassiopeia's hand as she peers out from around the older girl's legs.
A faun stares back at them.
(They don't know it yet, but this is the moment when their lives change forever.)
Albus Dumbledore wonders what it is that he will be seeing. He wonders where it is that his student (not your student, Albus Dumbledore, never your anything) has ended up. He wonders if it is here that she became so powerful. (Powerful enough to challenge even him.)
(He wonders if he can go there. He wonders if there is any way he can steal her power. He wonders if this showing will reveal a way for him to take her down.) (Oh Albus, you naive fool. Have you already forgotten how they cursed you, how easily they stopped you? You can not take her down. You do not have that power.)
Lucy Pevensie smiles when she sees Tumnus, the smile of a lion that has found its favourite prey. (They will tell you that she forgave him, for his betrayal. This is a lie; the Pevensies do not forget, and they do not forgive.) (Lucy never forgave him. She kept him close and acted the part of a friend to watch his guilt grow, to watch him drown in his own guilt.)
Cassiopeia does not follow Lucy inside the faun's den. She is there when the faun introduces himself (he names himself Tumnus. Foolish faun does not realize that he has given her his name, and thus, has given her power over him) and she is there when he asks if they are daughter's of Eve (Lucy tells him that they are, and Cassiopeia does not dispute the statement, although she does not know who Eve is) and she is there when Tumnus offers them both a cup of hot tea inside his den.
This is when she leaves, just after she has declined his invitation. She lets go of Lucy's hand and steps away and shakes her head when the young girl looks at her with a frown on her face. "I will not be joining you," Cassiopeia says, and does not tell them about how her magic whispers for her not to trust this faun. "Goodbye, Lucy. May we meet again."
She is gone before anyone can protest.
"You don't know what it means to be a Daughter of Eve?" Hermione asks, and there is shock in her voice. Many eyes turn to the bushy-haired witch, not just the eyes of the Pevensies, the hall murmuring the term amongst themselves. Most of the muggleborns and half-bloods are at least passingly familiar with the term.
The purebloods are not.
"That's a muggle thing, isn't it?" One of the older Slytherins ask, frowning as he considers the phrase. Hermione looks at him, scandalized that he does not know what a Daughter of Eve is, and begins to rant about purebloods and their 'complete ignorance of muggle culture and customs', but the older student stops her mid-sentence. "Hold up. You just said that this is something everyone knows, but that's not true, is it? It's from your religion. And that's great, but we don't follow your religion. How are we supposed to know what this phrase means?"
A few heads nod. Hermione opens her mouth, then closes it. (She wants to say more, she aches to say more, she wants to call them imbeciles and traditionalists and ignorant.) (She does not do this. She is low on allies, even she can see that, and she does not know how long the protection of Harry's status will keep her safe. So she bites her lips and holds her tongue, painful as it is.)
She does not leave them entirely, of course. Not when her magic says she cannot trust the faun. Not when she has taken a liking to this little girl and does not want to see her injured. She follows them from behind, ducking behind trees and gliding across snowbanks in order to remain unseen. She trails them up to a den, and she frowns as Lucy wanders inside without a moment's hesitation, and then she settles down to wait. (She will not leave this spot until Lucy walks out of that door.)
Edmund looks at his twin protecting their younger sister, even before they knew they were siblings, and feels a sudden surge of affection for Cass. (He always loves her, of course he does, but this is a newfound acknowledgement of just how much he loves her.) She saw a strange child, and chose to protect the younger girl, despite having no obligation to do so. How can he not love her with all his heart, when she has been protecting them since before she even knew who they were?
It feels like hours later (it is hours later) when Lucy stumbles out of the door with a betrayed expression on her face and a dazed look in her eyes, Tumnus on her heels, the faun looking around in fear as though someone is watching them. Cassiopeia scowls and darts out of her hiding spot, grabbing Lucy's hand and pulling her away from the faun, baring her teeth at this person who has betrayed this child.
"What did you do?" Cassiopeia hisses, and there is something inhuman curling between the words, something dark and dangerous and wild. The faun pales when he hears this inhumanity in her voice (a wildness all from this other land know, a wildness that settles in their souls and claims their hearts) and stumbles a step back, even though Cassiopeia has not advanced towards him. (Doing so would mean leaving Lucy, and that, Cassiopeia is not willing to do.)
The hall shudders when they hear the wildness lingering in Cass' words. They are familiar with her cruelty, with her jagged edges, but this is different, somehow. (She is different, somehow. They are not yet sure how, but they know that she is Changing.) (They know now that she has Changed. How did they not notice this before? Or did they notice it and just fool themselves into believing she was the same as she had always been?)
Lucy reaches for her sister, and Cass' friends part to allow the youngest Pevensie to curl up on her older sister's lap once more, head on Cass' shoulder and arms around Cass' waist. Lucy has always known that Cass will protect her, will protect them, from anything that might threaten them, but it is different, to see how ardently Cass loved Lucy even before they knew they were sisters.
"I love you, sister," Lucy whispers, and Cass smiles as she returns the sentiment. (There is nothing she would not do, has not done, for her siblings.)
Tumnus stammers his excuses. He says he didn't know, he says it was a mistake, he says he regrets it. Lucy weeps her betrayal into Cassiopeia's back and the older girl snarls her fury at the faun, looking more creature than human at that moment. (Narnia is already changing her.)
He says that the White Witch is on her way, and they are gone before he can say another word.
(Cassiopeia has heard of the White Witch. Or perhaps heard is not the right word. She knows of the White Witch, of her cruelty and callousness, although she couldn't tell you how. The wind whispered it to her, perhaps, or else the air breathed it into her ears.) (Cassiopeia has heard of the White Witch. Thus far she has not been found, because her magic cloaks her. But Lucy does not have her magic, and thus Lucy is not hidden.) (Cassiopeia will not allow this child to be harmed.)
Harry sees this innate protectiveness Cass has for the younger girl, and wonders if she ever protected him as fiercely. Surely she can't have; if she'd ever felt the urge to protect him as she seemingly protects this child, she would have gotten him away from the Dursleys, would have helped him when they decided to punish him. (Harry Potter, have you forgotten how she helped you as much as you allowed her to? Have you forgotten how she patched up your wounds, how she tricked them into eating poisonous mushrooms so you would have a few weeks of peace, how she saw you being hunted and became a predator to ensure you would be safe?) (Harry Potter, how can you say she has not protected you? She did nothing but help you until you gave her no choice but to walk away.)
"You'll be okay," Cassiopeia murmurs to the young girl she is holding in her arms, and she is sprinting towards where she first saw the other girl, unsure if it is by magic or luck that she does not trip over something she cannot see. Lucy whimpers quietly, tucks her head into the junction between Cassiopeia's neck and shoulder, and the older girl runs a hand over the younger's back. "You'll be okay," Cassiopeia murmurs (says, promises, prays). "I'm going to get you out of here."
She does not promise she will leave as well, because she does not know how to get back to Hogwarts (if such a place ever existed) and even if she did know, would she just appear in front of Slytherin's creature, fated to die before she can even see her friends again? So she does not promise that she will leave, although Lucy entreats her to. (This land already feels more like a home than anywhere else has.)
It hurts Sirius and Remus, to know that this world does not feel like home to their daughter. It hurts to know that she has always felt strange, that she has always felt different, that she has never found a place she feels she can belong. (But she has, do you not understand? Narnia is her home. Narnia is where she belongs.) (Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, you birthed a girl who has always belonged to another world.)
It hurts Narcissa and Amelia, too, to know that Cass has never felt quite at home in this world. But it hurts them for different reasons. They do not hurt knowing Cass has always felt off centre in this world; they hurt knowing no one ever gave her a reason to be at home. (A childhood spent in darkness, a childhood spent in a forest. No one ever gave her a home, no one ever gave her a reason to belong to this world.) (This is what happens when a child only ever learns how to run.)
Instead, she finds her way back to the place she first met Lucy. There, she puts the girl down, smooths down the flyaway strands of dark auburn hair, offers the younger girl a smile. "I want you to try and go back through those trees, okay? Hopefully you can get home before the White Witch comes."
Lucy sniffles, wipes her eyes on the sleeve of the coat she had taken from the wardrobe before she entered this land. (Narnia, that is what the faun had called it. Narnia. Cassiopeia rolls the word around on her tongue; it tastes like home.) She asks if Cassiopeia will be okay, and the older girl does not have the heart to lie to the girl, so she simply states that she does not know. Lucy cries a bit more at that; the younger girl promises to come back for Cassiopeia, and the older girl does not say anything. (She knows how easy it is to break a promise.) (She does not know that Lucy never breaks promises.)
And then Lucy is gone, slipping into the shadows beneath the trees, disappearing between one breath and the next.
Cassiopeia is alone.
It hurts the Pevensies, more than they thought it would, to see Cass standing alone in the snow-covered forest of Narnia. She looks simultaneously out of place and perfectly at home; at ease in Narnia as she always has been, but alone where they are used to seeing her always at the side of one of her siblings. (She looks smaller, somehow, when none of them are at her side.) (Is this what she looked like when they were forced to leave?)
They draw Cass back onto the beanbag with them, Lucy still clinging to her older sister, until the five siblings are once more tangled amongst each other. It alleviates the ache in their chests, somewhat, to have Cass cocooned within the pile that they have formed; it also worsens that ache, as they think about all that they could have had, all that they lost, all that was taken from them.
It is a week before Cassiopeia sees Lucy again.
She spends this week wandering through the forest where she first appeared, the forest in which she met Lucy for the first time. She could leave - almost leaves, when she reaches the edge of the forest and sees this new world stretching out before her - but something pulls her back from the open expanses that beckon her towards them. ("Wait," something inside her whispers. "Wait just a little longer.")
And so she waits, walking the forest until she feels she knows it better than she knows her own self. She learns to speak to those who dwell within the trees, and endears herself to the few animals that dare face the winter cold. (Already, their loyalty is shifting, from the cruel ruler of their country to this waif-girl who appeared out of nowhere.) She teaches herself to fly from tree to tree, leaping from branch to branch until she can traverse the entirety of the forest without once touching the ground. (She only falls a few times. Each time she lands in the snow, she swears she hears the ghost of a young boy laughing at her. Every time when she tries to find him, he isn't there.)
Edmund knows that feeling, that haunting.
He knows the laughter that comes out of nowhere, the ghost that disappears the moment you turn around, the person you can only ever see out of the corner of your eyes. He knows this, because he grew up like this. (With a twin-that-never-was, with the echo of unheard-laughter in his ears and the ghost of a never-seen smile on his face.)
He knows what it is to be haunted by someone you never even knew existed. (He never wanted that for his twin.) (He never wanted that but he cannot help but be happy that he has haunted her as she has haunted him.) (They truly are two halves of a whole.)
Susan-Peter see the haunting, and they ache with remembered grief. They know what it is to be haunted, although in a different way than Edmund and Cass, twins with a single soul that were forced to grow up in different times. They know what it is to be haunted by what could have been. (By what never was.) They know what it is to see a smile that should have been shared, to never know a face but to imagine what it might look like anyway.
(They have been haunted by Cass, too, if in a different than Edmund has.)
Seven days pass, and then Lucy returns, stumbling out of the same thicket of trees she'd disappeared into days before. From where she is perched in a tree, Cassiopeia watches the young girl look around and cannot keep herself from smiling as she drops from the tree, landing a few steps away from Lucy with nary a sound.
"Lucy," she calls, and the young girl spins around, face lighting up in a smile as she sprints towards Cassiopeia, throwing her arms around the older girl's waist, indecipherable sounds of happiness escaping the child's mouth. "It's good to see you too," Cassiopeia laughs, and then kneels in front of the young girl. "You look cold. Why don't you go see Tumnus? It's safe, for the moment, and I'm sure he'll be happy to see you."
(She does not trust the faun, but she trusts him enough to not harm Lucy. He has seen Cassiopeia, he has seen her snarl; he knows what will happen to him should he betray this child again.)
Idly, Draco-Luna-Neville-Ginny wonder what happened to that faun. They know their friend, you see, they know her better than anyone else in this world does. (But not better than her siblings, never better than her siblings.) (No one will ever know her as her siblings do. No one will ever love her as her siblings do.)
They know Cass, they know how she responds to betrayal. (Even if it is not a betrayal of her, but of someone close to her.) (Especially if it is a betrayal of someone close to her.) And so they wonder what happened to the faun, because they know she would never be content to allow this betrayal to slide without having her vengeance upon whoever betrayed the people she cares about.
Lucy asks why Cassiopeia won't join her, but the older girl does not answer, simply sends the child on her way with a smile and a wink. Truthfully, Cassiopeia does not know why she does not accompany Lucy. Perhaps it is because her magic is tugging at her, rooting her to the spot, telling her that there is still something she must see. (And Cassiopeia does not make it a habit to ignore her magic when it is trying to tell her something.)
She thanks her magic for telling her not to leave, when she sees the boy stumble out of the trees just a few minutes after Lucy appeared.
He is scrawny, in a way that tells of too little food and a few too many missed meals. (Scrawny in a way Cassiopeia is familiar with; she is intimately familiar with the pangs of hunger, as she imagines this boy must be too.) He has thick black hair that is just a little too unkempt and a downward tilt to his mouth that speaks of years of unhappiness.
He does not look like Lucy, like someone who has been cared for and loved all their life. He looks like Cassiopeia, scrappy and angry and alone, and it makes her heart ache to see it. (Something in her sings that he is familiar, past his appearance. She does not listen to it, not yet.) (She will learn what it was trying to say soon enough.)
Peter cannot bear to keep looking at the scene. He closes his eyes and wraps his arms around the twins, holding them as tightly as he can. He hates to be reminded of how he failed to protect Edmund, how he could not keep Edmund from drowning, how he could not keep Edmund from seeing the horrors of war. (He protected Lucy from seeing the war. Why could he not do the same for Edmund?) (It will always be Peter's greatest failing, that it took Narnia and Cass before he learned how to love Edmund without being sliced by the younger Pevensie's broken edges.)
Unlike Peter, Susan does not look away from the scene. She sees Edmund as he once was, anger and grief and pain combined in a body too small to hold all of the emotions. She sees the bitterness in his eyes and the loneliness written across his cheeks. (She saw these emotions, when she was younger, before they went to Narnia. She never knew how to take his pain.) (She would have taken his pain, if she could have.) She sees the emptiness at Edmund's side, where the other half of his soul should be standing. (This is what happens when a soul is split. This is what happens when twins are tethered but not together.)
Peter and Susan see their younger brother, and they mourn. (They know they have failed him.)
The boy is obviously unused to the snowy landscape, as he stumbles more than walks, and did not think to grab a jacket from the cupboard. He is shivering as he staggers through the forest, moving in the opposite direction to Lucy, utterly unaware of the girl trailing him like a shadow one does not know exists. She wonders whether to reveal herself, but then there is a noise like sleigh bells, and she instinctively stills, her magic wrapping around her tighter so that she is hidden from those who might try and harm her. The boy hides, too, dives into a bush so that he might be hidden.
The cover does not help him against someone with magic.
Cassiopeia watches as the boy is pulled out of the bush by a dwarf, thrown to the ground in front of someone who reeks of evil. (The White Witch, Cassiopeia knows. This is the only reason she does not try to help the boy; she is no match for someone who wields the power that this woman does.) The boy is crying (the tears freeze to his cheeks before they can touch the ground) and the woman (witch, creature, demon) pretends to be sympathetic. She welcomes him into her sleigh, and wraps her furs around his shoulders, and offers him hot chocolate. She cajoles information out of him ("You have siblings?" she asks, and the boy's mouth tightens, and there is a look of something broken in his eyes that Cassiopeia knows all too well) and she feeds him false promises of power (because there is nothing more tempting for a broken person than the power to never be broken again) and she presses into his hands a box of sweet treats he calls turkish delight (sweets that sing with temptation, sweets that drip with poison, sweets that Cassiopeia knows to be enchanted).
There is anger, at that. Students yelling at the White Witch, despite her being unable to hear them. Professors joining the students in their yelling, cursing at the wall as it shows how Edmund eats the turkish delight, cussing out the White Witch. And Cass joins in, screaming her fury at the sight of the White Witch with the enchanted sweets, and then Ginny is joining in too, and so is Peter-Draco-Neville-Susan-Luna-Lucy.
There is anger, at this enchantment. Anger at the deception, at the trickery, at the cruelty. (They are wixen; they know what it is, to be enchanted. Many of them know the feeling, others have read the accounts, but all of them are disgusted at the notion.)
Edmund stares around at all the people showing their anger over this enchantment, and there is a look on his face, the look of someone not entirely sure what is happening. (He was enchanted. He was cursed.) (He had no choice, but he has always blamed himself as though he did.)
(He sees people protesting on his behalf, sees his siblings screaming their anger at a person long dead, and a small piece of the ice in his veins melts.)
(Cassiopeia watches all of this, from a branch not even three metres above their heads. There is fury in her heart and vengeance in her veins. But she cannot harm the witch who has dared to enchant this unknowing boy; not yet.) (But she will. And oh, how she will make the witch suffer.)
When the boy returns to the thicket of trees where he first appeared from, Lucy is there, the young girl glowing with happiness after her time spent with the faun she met her first time in Narnia. (Happy to see the faun again, hiding her anger at his betrayal. She does not forgive, and will not forget.) She exclaims her delight over Narnia, and the boy agrees, but there is a look on his face that has Cassiopeia's heart aching. (He has been enchanted, and she knows that he will come back, and he will betray his sister. And it will be because of magic, but he will blame himself as if he had a choice.)
(Lucy names him Edmund, and the name echoes in Cassiopeia's soul. She has never heard the name before, but some part of her recognizes it.)
Edmund clings to Cass, perhaps a little tighter than he needs to. He huffs a laugh into her hair. (There is no humour in the sound.) Of course she knew that he would betray Lucy; she has always known him better than he knows himself. (Even when she didn't know him at all, she knew him better than he knew himself.)
Cass clings to Edmund, just as tightly as he holds onto her. She remembers the years before she knew him, those lonely years, those empty years. (It was so long ago, and yet she remembers the loneliness as clearly as though she met him for the first time just yesterday.) (How did she ever survive with half of her soul missing?)
When little Lucy Pevensie tumbles out of the wardrobe in the spare room of the Professor's manor, speaking of fauns and snow-covered lands and a girl with starlight eyes, her siblings worry.
("She's gone mad," Susan whispers to Peter as they witness Lucy insisting to Edmund that she really has met a faun, she isn't lying, she would never lie to her siblings. "It's the war," he whispers back, and there is a shock of guilt that rises in his heart, because he has tried so hard to protect his youngest sibling and he has failed.)
"What war?" Amelia Bones murmurs, worry in her heart as she looks to the five siblings that sit together at the front of the hall, wondering what they have gone through to make them so reliant upon each other. (That is the sort of bond that only forms between those who have stared death in the face, those who have never been able to trust anyone but each other.) (She hates to think of what they might have seen; she likes the Pevensies, if only because of how they seem to care for each other, and cannot bear the thought of any of them suffering.)
"Perhaps a muggle war?" Narcissa responds, holding onto Amelia's hand tightly. She, too, likes the Pevensies, if only because of how they care for her niece. She does not want to see them suffering. (She knows she will.) (More than that, she does not want to see any child suffer. She has never wanted to see how they have failed their children.)
Truthfully, Lucy does not remember the war. She remembers the hunger (ever-present, no matter how Peter tried to shield her from it) and the sunken cheeks of her siblings (she wouldn't realise for another five years that they had been slowly starving to death; she never knew them looking anything other than hungry). She remembers the fear (not her fear, she didn't know that there was anything to fear, but rather the fear her siblings wore like a second coat). She remembers the grief (Peter clinging to her just a little too tightly, Susan disappearing into books in an effort to escape, Edmund sobbing in the middle of the night).
But she does not remember the war. She does not remember seeing the hospitals full of the wounded, the destroyed streets where the bombs dropped, the soldiers with missing limbs and missing smiles. For this, she has to thank Susan and Peter, who looked at her (who looked at Edmund, who they failed to protect) and did everything that they could to give her a childhood full of innocence.
(She will never be able to thank them enough for giving her the childhood none of them had.)
They name her liar, they name her mad. But Lucy does not heed their words, hurtful though it is to think that her siblings do not believe her. She remembers the girl named Cassiopeia, she remembers the snow-covered forest of Narnia, and she clings to her belief. (Lucy does not lie except by omission when it suits her, and this is not one of those times.)
And then, a day comes when the four siblings find themselves in need of a hiding spot. And perhaps it is fate, that they should choose to hide inside the wardrobe which has shown itself to be a doorway to Narnia.
Four siblings enter a wardrobe.
Four siblings tumble into another land.
The Pevensies remember this. (Of course they do. How could they ever forget their own home coming?)
They remember the feeling of snow beneath their feet, the slight prickle of awareness at they slid from one world to another, the feeling of breathing in air purer than anything they had breathed before. They remember the shock, the wonder, the fear. They remember the realisation (Lucy wasn't lying) and the curiousity (how did they get here?)
(They remember the feeling of coming home.) (This is what belonging feels like.)
Lucy laughs when she feels the now-familiar feeling of snow underneath her feet. She laughs when she sees her siblings faces, sees their shocked expressions, sees their utter disbelief. She laughs when Peter apologizes, laughs and laughs and laughs until she can hardly breathe anymore. (She is not a liar except by omission, and now her siblings know this to be true.)
(Finally, her siblings are in Narnia. There is a sense of finality in this, and Lucy knows that this is where they will be happy. And that is all she has ever wanted for her siblings.)
"Were you happy?" Neville asks the Pevensies. It is the first time one of Cass' friends have spoken to them directly, and the siblings do their best not to startle. They look at Neville, this plant-souled boy who was their sister's first friend. (Draco is her family. Her friend too, of course, but Neville was the first stranger to look at their sister and decide she would make a good friend.) Ginny-Luna-Draco turn to the Pevensies as well, awaiting the siblings' answer, waiting to hear if their friend was happy in the time that she spent in that other world.
"We were." It is Susan who answers, when no one else does, smiling at Cass' friends. (She has heard about them. All of the Pevensies have. They know of Luna's love for stories, Neville's hidden wildness, Draco's fierce love, Ginny's wildfire heart.) (Cass never once forgot her friends, no matter how much time passed.) Susan looks at her siblings, remembering the times when they were the kings and queens of Narnia, remembering the joy of being five Pevensies. (As they were always meant to be.) "We were very happy. It was the happiest time of our lives, I think."
Cassiopeia is not there when they stumble out of the trees. Lucy tries not to be too disappointed; she tells her siblings that the other girl will likely show up at some point, and this time they believe her unquestioningly.
Lucy takes them to where Tumnus stays, because although she is still hurt that he betrayed her, he is sure to know where they can go, where they can stay whilst they explore this new land. He is not there, and she cries, but not out of sadness for the faun as her siblings expect. She cries because she does not know what to do. She cries because she is furious at this new world, for showing her siblings its darkness before they see its beauty. She cries because some part of her is missing, and she does not know what.
"What happened?" Susan breathes, whilst Peter wraps an arm around Lucy's shoulders and Edmund refuses to look at the bashed in door and bloodstains on the stone inside the den. (Already, the enchantment is at work on him, twisting his thoughts, twisting his words. He knows something is wrong, but does not know how to say it. He is drowning, silently, and none of his siblings notice.)
His siblings all cling to him, when they see how he is drowning, all wishing that they could change the past. (They never noticed then. How could they? They were children, with no knowledge of magic, and he was an angry boy. They couldn't have known to see his drowning in an enchantment.) (They couldn't have known, but they blame themselves as if they could have.)
He clings to them, too, when he sees how the enchantment is working. He remembers his betrayal, and he holds to them as tight as he can, needing the reassurance that they have not left him, that they do not blame him. (He had no choice. He blames himself like he did.)
They do not see the girl watching them, the girl who has been watching them since they arrived at the faun's den. (The girl who sees Edmund's pain, who notices him drowning when his siblings assume he is safe on dry land.) They do not see her, even as their eyes pass over where she stands, until she clears her throat and steps forward, offering an explanation to Susan's question. "The White Witch took him, for the high crime of offering aid and shelter to a daughter of Eve."
The siblings startle at the sudden appearance of this girl. Peter moves to push Lucy behind him, but the young girl evades his hand, darting forwards and throwing herself into the arms of this stranger, who wraps her own arms around Lucy and deftly picks the child up, balancing her on her hip.
"Ah," Peter says. "You must be Cassiopeia, then. Lu has told us much about you."
The girl raises a brow, and the Pevensie siblings take a moment to study her, taking in her night-dark hair (so much like Susan's) and her honey skin (a few shades darker than Peter's own) and her silver eyes that almost seem to glow (resembling Edmund's own eyes). They see wariness in the way she stands, and defensiveness in the tension in her shoulders, and fury in the twist of her lips.
Now that they can see the Pevensies, as they were as children, as they were before they knew Cass, it does seem far stranger that they should look similar. Cass looks like a mix of all of the other Pevensies; they all look like they have been inspired from her. They look like siblings, even as children, and this is most certainly strange.
Remus Lupin glances at the scene consideringly, gripping his husband's hand tightly as he wonders what is happening. He'd thought they were siblings through name, but not blood, but suddenly he finds himself doubting this certainty. Surely they are blood-related; how else could they look so similar? (But they are not blood-related, he knows this.) (What other explanation could there be?)
They see themselves, reflected back at them, and it is almost enough for Peter and Susan to burst into tears as they imagine what might have been. (Is this what she would have looked like, had she survived?)
"Yes," she says after a long moment has passed. "I am called Cassiopeia Adhara. And what might you be known by?"
The Pevensies trade smiles among each other when they see this scene. This is the moment everything changes. This is the moment they are together, as they always should have been. This is the first time they meet Cass, the first time she meets them.
(They are so happy to have met her.) (They were empty without her.)