A/N: Who even knows where I got THIS idea? Note that the Doncaster train crash is real, but I've changed some details. Also, the OC is mine, but obviously nothing else is.
"Will the others see you too?" asked Lucy.
"Certainly not at first," said Aslan. "Later on, it depends."
"But they won't believe me!" said Lucy.
"It doesn't matter."
― C.S. Lewis
"English acquisition," Mozzie said, in that hushed, excited tone he only had when it's something illegally geeky, or vice versa. "It's got a history, too. Salvaged from a bombed out English country mansion during the war. And then—"
"And then?" Neal prompted, his interest piqued. Mysterious 1940s fractal antennae had a way of varnishing anything war-related with particular intrigue.
"Pretty much forgotten about," Mozzie said, fumbling for the keys. He came up with a veritable jailer's ring—but even though Mozzie had many storage units, Neal assumed that most of the keys were fake, a bluff.
Sure enough, Mozzie counted twenty keys meticulously before grasping the right one. "Owner died in the late '40s, didn't leave any family," he said. "You've heard of the Doncaster train station crash?"
"Yeah," said Neal.
"Fourteen dead. Owner was on it." Mozzie huffed and puffed at raising the storage door. Neal, rolling his eyes fondly, stepped forward to help. When it was raised, Neal whistled.
"Pity he had to leave this behind," he observed.
"Yeah, well, much as we wish otherwise, we can't take it with us." Mozzie sighed. "And before you ask, this doesn't have anything to do with Adler. I'm just running middle man for Lacey."
"Lacey. Antique and rare furniture." Neal lifted an eyebrow. "Never met her. Nice of you to hold it here, Moz." He paused, then traced a semi-circle with his steps, examining. "Why'd you call me, though?"
"The wood." Mozzie shook his head. "It's apple, maybe? But out of the ordinary. I've never seen a grain like it. I'm not so overcome with the burden of hubris not to want a second opinion."
"Can't help you there—I've never seen this either. It's probably just a very old tree." Neal stretched out his hand and touched it. A second later he snatched his hand back as if he'd been burned.
"What?" Mozzie demanded sharply.
Neal shook his head. "No idea. Got a weird—shock, something."
"Off of a wooden wardrobe?"
Neal shrugged, staring at the carven doors. "Like you said. Must be no ordinary wardrobe."
...
Mozzie texts Lacey and tells her that her package has arrived.
Neal goes home, strangely tired, even more strangely unsettled, sets his hat on the table, and tumbles into bed.
He dreams of lions.
...
On Thursday evening, Moz showed up in a moving van.
"There's been a problem," he said. "Lacey's undergoing an audit."
"Your bomb-escaping wardrobe isn't legal?" Neal asked, with a twinkle in his eye. "I'm shocked."
"June said I could keep it in the back of the house for the rest of the week. Help me unload it?"
Neal stilled for just a moment, fingers tingling. "How'd you get it in the van in the first place?"
"Called in a couple favors," Mozzie returned vaguely. "Now, are you going to help me or what?"
They opened the truck. Unable to help himself—he'd never been able to help himself—Neal tugged aside the dusty sheet, rested his hand against the paneled door.
Snowflakes, and wind that swirled like a bar of music. He had been seven, the winter that it snowed. His mother had been happy that day—she and Ellen and he had walked through the park together, and sky was grey and white, a softened sky, all alight though the sun was hidden.
"Neal," Moz was saying, insistent and irritable. It meant he was repeating himself. "I don't want to be crushed to death by something that may or may not have started life as a mutant apple tree. Help.
"Right, sorry," said Neal.
They shut the wardrobe up in June's windowless back room.
...
There is a memory somewhere in the far recesses of his mind. Neal tries to paint, and throws down the brush in dismay. He rifles through his bookshelves, pauses over Grimm's Fairytales, and shakes his head.
Something isn't right.
He thinks that sleep won't find him that night, but it does.
...
The floor beneath his feet is marble, one long block uncut and unseamed, gold and rose like no stone he's ever seen before. It stretches out towards a triptych of stained glass windows. Behind them is the froth and crash of an unknown sea.
A near-silent padding, velvet and heavy, comes behind him. Neal freezes. He is afraid; he is curious—it is a child's fear and curiosity, the innocence of it light and sweet and tragic in a way he has not known for many years.
He wants to turn. He cannot.
The voice that speaks is all around him.
"Why have you come here?"
...
Life went on. Neal chased time, Neal chased Adler. The frownline between Peter's eyebrows deepened, as it always did when something big was drawing near.
Fate, always over Neal's shoulder—
He could not turn now any more than he ever could.
"You can be a con or a man," Peter said. He looked like a father. It hurt Neal to know that, since he'd never really had one—he just knew what they looked like. Every lost child knew what they looked like. "You can't be both."
...
The water of the unknown sea is around his ankles. The glossy windows shatter, and the shards melt into a delighted crowd. Neal's ears are ringing.
All hail Peter, the High King.
There is a crown on Neal's head, too, a crown like the shining king in the distance. He lifts it, brings it down, knows that it is solid gold and worth a traitor's ransom.
His ransom.
This cannot be mine, he thinks. Nothing is ever his to begin with; that is why he is a thief.
Why have you come here?
Fate, with velvet paws, is on his very heels. And before he knows—dream time is no time at all, the wardrobe's wood is not like wood at all—Neal is running, calling Peter's name. I can be both, he wants to say. A con and a man; he is Peter's friend and Peter's prisoner. He is everything all at once, and always too much.
They have made it work, haven't they? He has made it work; he has pressed his hands to the cogs of the universe, and turned their tread back.
Nobody is ever told what would have happened.
"Please," says Neal. He is begging. All he wants to know is everything. All he wants to know is if he has two ways out of this at once.
It cannot be too much to ask; the answer to either question is an ending, after all.
When he wakes, he untangles himself from his sheets and admits in silence that there has to be a third way.
A way where it doesn't end.
...
The day before Lacey came for the wardrobe, Neal did a strange thing. He waited until June had taken her dog for a walk, and then he unlocked the backroom and went in. The wardrobe filled the space, filled the silence, like a living thing.
Sometimes art drove people mad. But Neal didn't feel like he was going mad. He felt like he was remembering, and it hurt. He opened the wardrobe and stepped inside.
It might have been foolish, but he had never concerned himself much with feeling foolish. There was simply no purpose to it.
The wardrobe smelled like dust, and mothballs, and pine.
He let the darkness swallow him up, ran clever fingers up and down the inner panels, as though there might be a secret catch.
There was always a catch, wasn't there? And this time the catch was that there was none.
...
"I'm Lacey," said the young woman at June's door. She had freckles and thick, shining brown hair. A little young to be in their line of business, Neal might have thought, except that he'd been in the busy a little young, too.
"Neal. It's nice to meet you. Moz—something came up. He should be here shortly. Said to send you his best, if you can't stay."
"Thanks! I can't wait to see it," Lacey said, practically bouncing into the house. She handed him an envelope. "That's for Moz. The second half of his payment."
"Advance? You've already got a buyer?"
"A buyer?" she looked confused. "Oh, no, no. This is just for Mozzie's troubles. He's been looking for this for a long time." She smiled wistfully. "I'm bringing this home."
"Of course," Neal said, and slipped her a charming smile. "Need help wheeling it up into the truck?"
She did. She wiped the dust from her hands on her jeans and grinned at him when the job was done. "Thanks, Neal. I've heard a lot about you."
He smiled brighter, concealing the fact that he was always wary when people said that. "A pleasure. You and Mozzie go way back?"
"Oh, yeah." Her eyes went dreamy. "He knew how much this meant to me."
Neal lowered his voice conspiratorially. "How—if you don't mind me asking, what was the other half of his payment?"
"Didn't he tell you?" Lacey grinned. "He wanted to keep it here for a week."
...
"Lacey Pevensie Shaw," Moz said, thoughtfully. He took the envelope Neal handed him and tucked it in his jacket pocket. "Bright girl, sorry I missed her. Her grandmother was related to some of the Doncaster victims."
Neal eyed him skeptically. "Yeah? You didn't mention that before. Actually, there's a couple things you didn't mention before."
Moz looked innocent, or tried to. "Oh?"
"This wasn't some trade-off—you were giving it back to some family or friend connection to the owner, weren't you?"
"It's a long adventure of a story," Mozzie returned cryptically. "The point is, Neal—I wanted to see it too. I've heard of it all these years. And Lacey's stories were right. It wasn't an ordinary wardrobe. You said so yourself."
"That's why you wanted it around for a week."
"Research," Mozzie said, and then scuttled away down the street.
...
In Neal's dream, the castle is gone. There is a stone table before him, stained dark and forbidding. But behind its shadow lies the sun. Neal is drawn towards it, and he only notices that he's running when he is halfway to the golden glow that shimmers in the far-off sea.
For just a moment, he thinks he hears the velvet paws of fate behind him. But he can't turn back. The third way is not a way out—it's a way forward.
He just might take it.