FicWad

Apprehension
by Charis

Disclaimer: The Chronicles of Narnia and //and all associated characters belong to people who are not me. I'm just borrowing.

Notes: Movie-inspired; I think I'm a hopeless Jadis fangirl now. Draws some elements from both /Shadowlands /and Jewish mythology, moreso than Christian.

Apprehension (noun): 1. Fearful or uneasy anticipation of the future; dread. 2. The act of seizing or capturing; arrest. 3. The ability to apprehend or understand; understanding.

In another world, the boy takes the fruit and brings it back to his mother, but it is of Narnia still, and all that passes the dying woman's lips is an apple. She watches him go with a smile, but there is no warmth to it, only bleak satisfaction.

- x -

In another world, she wears a serpent's shape and does not need to climb over the wall, does not need to taste the fruit herself. There is a man here, and a woman, and she knows them from a dream, and though a snake cannot smile, neither can it speak, and she does smile when the woman heeds her whispers and hands the fruit to the man, flesh exposed white beneath red, red skin.

- x -

In another world, she stands at the right hand of a Being enthroned, and speaks what must be said - the inevitable other side, necessary as rain and breath - though they will hate her for it. Condemnation or not, she has no choice.

- x -

In another world, they slay her children, and she vows to wreak a bloody vengeance in exchange. Here she lives first within those walls, so close to the Tree itself, and leaves by her own will and a Word men no longer know.

- x -

In another world, she speaks a Word and destroys everything she had ever known, and does not look back as the shadows close around her. The ice around her heart is cold enough to burn.

- x -

In every world, in every shadow and light, certain threads weave true: she lives, and she knows (too much never enough), knows her part in this with an intimacy that burns to fierce anger, but knows nothing of how to change it.

She knows she will lose, she will die, she will give way as winter to spring, and it drives her relentlessly towards madness, as surely as the Deep Magic that wraps around her bones does. She wonders sometimes, in rare moments of lucidity (out the other side of madness and back to being sane) if she was not already mad: can you look on the end of all you know and not be?

She knows, though she oft forgets it save in dreams (nightmares), her adversary's truest face. It is meet that enemies should know each other's secrets, each other's hearts. But the knowledge avails her nothing, no more than understanding the runes that girt the Table on which the traitors bleed serves her: knowing changes nothing. Her path has been set; she has no choice. No matter how she twists and turns, no matter how she tries to recall that serpentine evasiveness, each step pushes her closer to that inevitable ending.

She knows his face, but the knowledge burrows deep beneath winter's snowfall, and the path is obscured. She can believe she has lost it, and in time, she does.

There are moments - the Boy, the Lion, the Table itself - when something flickers, but it is nothing. Forgettable. She moves.

There is battle, and the anger burns hotter than any fire, and no-one can touch her - not even the foolish Boy, though he breaks her wand before she can stop him. But it does not matter, because victory will be hers -

And then she is flat on her back with the Lion's face great and terrible above hers, and the winter melts, and she knows again, /knows /that this is why it all was As It Was, and for the briefest of moments, she sees that truer face and recognises it as if for the first time -

Then there is only fire, and darkness.

- finis -