(A/N: Hey, look! A 'Time For Us' one-shot! How perfectly exciting! Alert CNN and MSNBC! Sushi actually followed through on what she said she'd do!)

Edmund Pevensie woke with a start. The darkness of the room was pressing in on his eyes like it was some solid entity in itself, and the weight of it all threatened to choke him; to drown him in night. Indeed, his flannel pajamas were so soaked in cold sweat that he imagined, in the fleeting shadows of his mind, that he was swimming in a sucking, swirling ocean.

But Edmund, king of Narnia, was not one to fear the dark. Why, he'd challenged many a foe and beaten them back to their hovels and holes to nurse their wounds and their pride. Who was he to dread some shadow in the corner?

His racing heart knew otherwise. Edmund Pevensie was no longer a king; no longer did he sit enthroned in Cair Paravel, or lift the seal of justice over the land. He was a king in exile; a foreigner in a alien country. The boy was all-too-often reminded of this sad fact whenever he reached for his sword in the throes of sudden fear, or touched his smooth, soft cheeks, or fidgeted at the roughness of restrictive clothing.

Ed was a boy once more. A boy…nothing but a boy…

It was that voice again. That taunting, teasing, disquieting voice that always reared its ugly head in the depths of his inadequacy—

No. I have a son.

Edmund kicked the sheets away, their snapping and rustling a satisfying punctuation for his sharp thoughts. A son…and a wife…"Narnia," he said aloud, willing the lilting word to take form in the darkness, to sweep him up and carry him back.

But only emptiness answered, and Peter, in the bed on the other side of the room, stirred and turned over in his sleep.

With a deep sigh, Edmund flung his arm over his eyes and crinkled the bedslip between his fingers. Why? He'd finally found a reason—that's what he called her now, his Reason—and then, just when they'd begun a life, a family, even, it was torn from him like a leaf from a tree before it's fully green.

How much time had passed? Was it just a few months, like it had been for him? Or would Arrania—her name still made his heart leap—be graying, old and weary with life? The thought chilled Edmund to the bone, and his eyes sprung open, straining to see through the inky blackness. Wicked death, keep away!

The night sighed with the weight of the world, and Edmund sighed with it. He'd traded his love for reoccurring childhood. Why? Why? Why? He shut his eyes against the ghostly echoes of his plea, but he could hear them resound from every crevasse—his heart, his mind, even the corners of the murky room.

Suddenly desperate, Edmund flung himself over onto his stomach and buried his face in his pillow, blocking out the reaching tendrils of darkness and their sighing chants. Yet still they mocked him with their false hopes and fatal pitfalls. Why…why…be a man…why…

But if there is one thing that youths may do that grown men cannot, it is to weep without shame. And so Edmund did.