Chapter Text
They came back.
It is hard to underscore how monumental this is: the Pevensie children came back . Many of the young men and women who set off from London during that terrible time were left where they fell: on beaches, under rubble, in forests and in hospitals strewn across that blood-soaked Continent. But the Pevensie children, who went further afield than any other, across entire universes: they came back. They reigned for fifteen long years over that great mount of Narnia—or Under-hill, depending on who you believe—and yet, returned, children, barely begun in their coming of age. What terror, what disbelief, what hope must they have felt to return to their almost forgotten youth in England?
It is hard to underscore how monumental this was, mainly because no one very much noticed. Oh, sure, the siblings were different, but for Heaven’s sake, they just got through a war! (Several, actually, but again, this was tricky to notice.) Many children sent off to the country, away from their mothers and fathers, from their friends and neighborhood haunts, returned… different. It was a difficult time, and there is a reason that the Britons have long been wary of the forest, telling stories of fairy rings and changelings. The country is a wild place. And as for the children—because no matter the sweet and pretty lies told by the Foreign Office, the young boys off at war were children —returning from the continent; well, to come back must have felt quite the same to them as it did to the Pevensies.
So, perhaps all four of them seemed mature beyond their years, and seemed to have spent the summer getting much cleverer, but no one took note. This is what happens when children get older. Lucy still lived her life with an unshakeable belief in magic, and Edmund remained just a tad bit too acerbic to get along with everyone. Susan emerged from that golden country a bit more sure of herself—but Susan had long been a girl possessing a sure sense of direction. Peter, perhaps, appeared most changed: there is a certain level of brashness and stupidity expected of a young man of his age which seemed to pass him by entirely. But levity was hard to come by during those dark days. In this, they were a comfort to those around them—children who escaped, mostly unscathed, from the gaping, rending maw of British action and inaction upon the Continent.
And they went to school, and made good marks, and if their friends tended to see them a bit more like exalted royalty than strictly proper; well, it’s not the first time popular children presided over courts of their peers. Truly, the most remarkable thing about the Pevensies was in how pedestrian they seemed. All of them charismatic, bright, and intelligent to a fault—but nothing no one has seen before. And even as the siblings traveled once, twice, thrice more among the wilds of another world, they remained children, full of a child’s peculiarity, but not overmuch so.
Of course, as they grew older they were well loved by those around them.
“That Susan,” Mrs. Goodwin would say, “has a mind for politics that I last saw ten years ago, and that woman is now an MP's undersecretary!”
And Mr. Reuel, the fencing coach, would say to anyone who would listen that, “Peter Pevensie—you know, the blonde one—is nearly good enough to get on the National team, if he wasn’t so insistent on the Army after university!”
(Like most coaches, Mr. Reuel might have been a bit biased)
And as little Ricky Carroll stared moonstruck across the school yard, he would fervently imagine saying, “Lucy, you have the prettiest smile I know. Wouldja like to go to the soda shop on Friday?”
The Pevensie siblings were easy to fall in love with, but we all know people like that. Some people have that special sort of magnetism that pulls on everything around them, and sure, while it feels special and wonderful and terrifying in equal measures to be drawn into their orbit, it isn’t, in fact, anything especially unusual about them. That’s just what love is. The Pevensies, despite their impossible histories, were no more remarkable than any of the other remarkable children making their way in the world.
And then, of course, there’s the train crash, and no one thinks very much of the Pevensie children at all.