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Characters: Caspian X, Other(s)
Relationships: Edmund/Caspian
Setting: Prince Caspian
Notes: Filmverse, I suppose. This part is short; the second is rather longer.
Rating: T
Warnings: None
Summary: There was so much you longed to do the last time you had him here, but you weren’t comfortable or confident enough to make a move.
Something is different about how you behave towards Ed. Compared to how you treat his siblings, that is. And it’s been this way ever since you met him. You don’t know how long it took you to first realise this, but once you do it’s all you can think about. And you’ve spent months running scenarios in your head, deciding how you’d act if you ever see Ed again. But none of it helps you decide what to do now.
What you want is to achieve the near-impossible: Ed’s re-appearance in your life. Never what you’d call fortunate in matters of the heart, you nevertheless think about it constantly, catching yourself day-dreaming about what it would be like. You don’t dare believe you will ever be in the same reality as him again.
Before this, before Ed, you thought you wouldn’t find anyone you wanted to spend the rest of your life with. That misconception lasted until you first met Edmund Pevensie when he and his siblings answered Queen Susan’s Horn during the uprising against your uncle. You liked him from the moment you met him, and wanted to get to know him better. The fact you got on so well together sparked the thought deep in your brain of whether there couldn’t be something deeper, something more, between you.
Once you realised what that meant, and worked out you wanted Ed as something more than a friend, you’d been uncomfortable with the idea. Until you felt comfortable in your own head, you held yourself back from interacting with Ed for as long as you dared. You suspect this both upset and confused him.
Much of the problem was the fact you’d known Ed for a handful of days at most, by that point, and you were unwilling to admit he had the potential to undo you. Nor did you yet want to acknowledge how he could bring you, both metaphorically and literally, to your knees.
Denial like that, deliberate and sustained, has the potential to bring you nothing but misery. Because the more you saw of Ed, the more you wanted him. Giving in to what you wanted, which you knew even as you were falling for him would happen as soon as you had even the whisper of a chance, would be out-of-control and messy. Your family, your inexperience with relationships, your position; all of these things and more would make sure of that. Which is probably why you’d found denial easier to cope with then. And before you could articulate, even to yourself, what you wanted from Ed beyond friendship Aslan pulled the two of you apart and sent Ed back to his own world.
***
You will see him again, although it won’t be for some time. And long before you see him again you will find yourself despairing that it will even happen.
It will be a long, lonely, three years.
