tatooine-jedi:

The Pevensies going camping for a week and being content (modern au or current timeline, modern AU would make it more of a wtf how are you kids so okay with being without technology for a week and how did you learn to hunt and skin a deer…ect.) Finally away from the cities and cars, away from everything that makes them remember they are not kings and queens.

They play pretend, or so their mother hopes because the words she overhears her children saying and the things she can hear them talk about makes her shiver in horror. Perhaps its a way of coping with the recent war and the struggles of growing up post-war. There is no way her sweet Lucy rode into battles and killed people.

Helen Pevensie watches as her eldest children discuss politics, using terms she’s only ever heard Winston Churchill use.

Edmund and Peter use large sticks as sword, she’s yelled at them for this before, they might hurt one another but before she can stop them mid swing she finds herself watching as they block each blow with such precision it seems unnatural for her young children to know how to do without years of practice.

She sees how Susan talks of boys, or rather men, how they courted her and wooed her. How a few succeeded in doing so, and how some almost started wars over her. Edmund laughs and calls her Helen of Troy and Susan lightly pushes him over.

A year later this camping trip is still very much the same, only Susan once Helen asks her about of any suitors that have been asking for her grows quiet and says she didn’t find any of them to her liking. Lucy consoles Susan over Caspian and her mother wonders as she passes by who this boy was that had such an effect on her daughter and why she’s not with him and why she’s never heard of him.

She watches Peter who spars with a a tree, hitting at it for a minute in full rage and anger and Helen goes over to him, a mothers concern written over her face and Peter has to remember he is becoming a man again, his time in Narnia is done. High King Peter is dead, and Peter Pevensie son of Helen Pevensie has to rise in his place and so he clings to his mother who says nothing but holds her eldest son. Later she does the same with Susan.

This camping trip is quieter, less laughter, less talking and she can’t help but wonder if all of her children need a change of scenery, deciding to talk to her husband about taking Susan with them when they go to America and sending Edmund and Lucy to their Aunt and Uncle Scrubb. Peter asks if he can be tutored by the Professor Kirke and Helen can’t say no. Digory’s done so much for her children already, if Peter needs tutored by the professor, it’ll be done.

Lucy and Edmund talk of magical worlds again, still in their own world, trying to find comfort in it, in the possibility of going back and how many more times can they go back before they can not return again. Helen worries this magical world they’ve been talking of for years has become a problem, an extreme coping mechanism but as she hears Susan and Peters sobbing she doesn’t wish that on any of her children, this grief over some loss. So she holds her two younger children close as she tries to do the same to the older children and they push her away. Both poised with their back straight and heads held high and regal, while the younger snuggle into their mother, trying to push the idea of not being back in Narnia away, sure hey have at least one more adventure in store.

Maybe there would be no more camping trips for a while.