Work Text:
Being the middle child is the worst.
Especially since, by all rights, Susan should count as a middle too, but she's the oldest girl, plus she's smart and sensible and all the grown-ups like her. Peter, as the eldest and at this point practically a grown man, gets all the responsibility (which Ed doesn't envy one bit) but also all of Father's approval and attention (which does tend to rankle). And Lucy, well, she's always going to be the baby, carefree and charming and cute.
Edith's just the middle child. Which means being ignored for the most part, or being in trouble, or sometimes both at the same time.
When Lucy comes running with her fanciful tales of the wardrobe taking her to another world, no one believes her, but she's the youngest so they coddle her. If it had been Ed, she would have been roundly punished and then sent to bed without supper or some such fate; if it had been one of the older two, they wouldn't have pulled this sort of thing in the first place; so it's supremely unfair that everyone just pulls sad faces and plays along with Lucy's game.
(Well, almost everyone. Edith can't resist taking every chance she can to tease her about it, even though every single time Lucy just bursts into tears and then Ed's the one getting in trouble, when Lucy's the one making up fanciful stories. Not fair, but Ed's used to it.)
And then it turns out not to be a game after all.
--
Edith isn't quite sure what is real.
Fact: she is in a stuffy old coat closet in a stupid dusty spare room somewhere in the house. Fact: she is standing in snow, with trees all around, and she can feel the chill against her cheeks and creeping through her (not suitable for winter) shoes, and she can smell the sharpness of pines and the freshness of air that has not been cooped up for ages, and she can see the brightness of sky above her and the forest that stretches on around her for what must be miles.
These two facts can't both be true.
Can they?
There's no sign of Lu -- it's just like her, Ed thinks, to run off straight away -- and no sign of any other living thing; but after a moment the unnatural stillness is broken by the faint sound of bells. Edith knows she should go back to the wardrobe, leave before she gets caught, but her legs seem welded to the ground as she just stands there.
Before long she sees the source of the bells: two white reindeer pulling a sledge, and on top of the sledge, the most gloriously beautiful lady Ed has ever seen. She is like the snow around them, pure and perfect.
Edith can't stop staring.
It turns out that she is the Queen of this place, and she looks the part. She is made of stardust, Ed thinks dizzily; stardust and magic and glory and power.
(Later, much later, Aslan the Lion will say to Edith, you love her. Edith will bite her lip and look away, unable to put words to her feelings. She is too young to love, she will protest; besides, everyone knows that girls can't love girls. But Aslan will just say, can't they? in his low purr that is more terrifying than comforting.)
The Queen invites Edith to sit with her, and a part of her knows it's wrong to sit with strangers, but she's so cold and the white fur looks so warm, and anyway, it wouldn't do to say no to a queen. So she sits carefully at the Queen's feet and lets herself be wrapped in the softest whitest fur she has ever felt.
"Isn't that better," says the Queen. "And now perhaps something hot to drink?"
"I'm fine, thanks," Ed says as politely as she can manage, but her teeth are chattering, and the queen gives a light laugh and conjures up a steaming drink that smells intoxicating.
Fact: magic isn't real. But Ed has long since given up on rationality. And the drink warms her to her toes, making her comfortably drowsy, and when the queen offers food she answers the first thing that pops into her head. She's never actually hadTurkish Delight, so she has nothing to compare it to, but the first one dissolves like spun sugar in her mouth, and the second is even better, and she has a whole box to herself.
And the queen is asking about how she came here -- Ed tells her of the war, and their relocation to the countryside, and what absolute insufferable idiots her siblings are, and Lu's game with the wardrobe, and how Susan and Peter took her side, and on and on. A part of her mind sleepily wonders if she is saying too much, but the queen doesn't lose interest.
"Three siblings, you say. I would very much like to meet them."
Sullen, Ed shuts her mouth on what she wants to say and manages to be sulkily polite. "They're nothing special. Your Majesty."
Another laugh. "You misunderstand, my dear." A cool hand rests on Edith's cheek, tipping her face up. There is a smile on the Queen's face, and it looks a little unpracticed but Ed doesn't really care because she is totally and wholly enraptured. "I am old," the Queen continues, "and I have no children of my own, I need a smart, capable girl to succeed me. I've been searching for years and here you are. What do you say, my sweet: Princess now and Queen later when I am gone?
It sounds impossible; it sounds amazing; it floods Ed with unbridled glee. "Me, Your Majesty?"
"Of course you!"
Edith almost says yes, then hesitates. "Then why do you want to meet my siblings at all?"
"Well, every good queen needs courtiers, don't you think? Your brother could be a Duke, perhaps, and your sisters Duchesses."
"And I'd be queen," Edith repeats dreamily.
(Aslan will tell her, later and in private, that both the food and the drink were enchanted, designed by the White Witch to bend the will of whoever ate them. It will make a neat excuse: she didn't betray her siblings by choice, she was forced to do so by magic. But by that point Edith will feel older enough to know that excuses are not reasons, and in truth she would have followed the Queen without any magic at all.)
--
"Ta ta, my princess," the Queen sings out as she leaves, and the sticky queer sickness lingering from the Turkish Delight vanishes under the weight of Edith's sheer excitement. Her, a princess -- a queen to be -- and bossing her siblings around! No longer the middle child, but the best of all of them.
Lu finds her shortly thereafter, and Edith can hardly get a word in edgewise through all of the babbles about Dear Mister Tumnus The Faun and the White Witch.
Briefly the sick feeling returns, like she is standing on ground that isn't quite steady. The Queen, an evil Witch? -- but no. Fauns will say anything, after all, and the Queen had been so nice.
Edith smirks to herself, and thinks: You only got a playmate, Lu. I got a country.