Disclaimer: These characters do not belong to me.

Notes: Eh, I've had this written for forever, and finally decided to post it. To me it feels like every other Peter and Edmund brother-fic I've written, but hopefully it reads all right. :)

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It's nice, they tell you, that you and your brother are so close. You don't know how to tell them that it is now impossible for you to be any other way; you don't know how to tell them that once you have lived through an endless winter and the regime of a madwoman, once you have seen death bloom red on his lips and cloud his eyes, once you have held him in your arms with the life breathed back into his body, you find that every moment is more precious than the last, and that to have him there with you is the greatest gift of all.

They say to you, don't you ever fight? Of course you do. You fight all the time. Rarely is it the petty fighting of children (because you aren't children anymore, that is the point. You're adults crammed into the tight bodies of children, but you know far too much for your age), but you do fight—you argue with him when he spends the evening out in the rain-soaked grass, catching drops of water in his hair and his soot-colored eyelashes. You wonder at the ridiculousness of worrying about him catching a cold when you have seen him bleeding from a sword's sharp thrust into his chest, but still you tell him, what happens if you get pneumonia, Ed? and gladly accept the title of 'mother hen.'

Edmund is a small bundle of sharp elbows and sharper pride, and he gives you a freezing look when he thinks you are coddling him; you try to keep it back, you do, but it's so hard when your sleep resounds with the sound of his breath wheezing out of his bleeding chest and you find him falling, falling, falling out of your grasp and you cannot catch him. You have but one brother in your life, and he is the dearest thing in the world to you, and somehow when you try to tell him that the words stick in your throat.

But it doesn't matter so much. He gives you a freezing glare when he thinks you're treating him like he is five and not fifteen, but he puts up with it when you remind him he's forgotten his scarf in the winter, and he lets you pull him in close and bury your nose in his hair when it is morning, and you remember that he is not dead and the only red on him is the scarlet of his sweater.

So it is difficult for others to understand the way the two of you are. But then, none of them have Narnia in their blood.

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