Uhm Help, I Really Have A Crush On DS Ben Jones From Midsomer Murders. I Can't Help He Is Charming And

lucy talks to rabadash before aslan judges him.

she never knew him well—she's never been very interested in any of her sister's suitors, not unless she's certain she'll need to step in, and he seemed reasonable enough, if smug and rather small in personality when he visited cair paravel. she didn't understand why susan wanted to go to calormen, but she'd never stop her sister from something that might make her happy, and edmund was going with her, so it's not like anything could go wrong. and anyway, someone needed to stay at cair paravel while peter went to the north. lucy would rather have gone with peter, but she'd also rather susan not be alone in the south. susan's alone all too often while the rest of them venture out across narnia. it's only fair she gets to spread her own wings a little.

they never thought anything could go wrong, no matter what the reputation of the tisroc. but then suddenly the splendour hyaline is spotted at the mouth of the harbor, and the raven is bringing her news both joyous and grievous in turn of her siblings' northern flight, and now there's a stag come to tell her that rabadash and a company two hundred strong have come to lay siege to anvard. lucy has an idea what he's crawled out of calormen for, and it's nothing to do with archenland. judging by the sick look on her sister's pale face, susan can guess well enough herself.

it's that look that has lucy mounting up beside edmund and riding out to anvard at double time. there is very little she wouldn't do for her family, and the lion help anyone who is the cause of her sister's distress. in the end, it's probably better it was edmund who fought rabadash in battle, because lucy's not so sure she'd have spared him.

the morning before he is to be judged, she escorts herself to the chambers where he is confined, a knife in each hand, and locks the door behind her. he is unbound, but the look in her eye keeps him seated in the chair where she finds him.

"i should like you to know," she tells him, not bothering with proper greetings—he does not deserve them, after all—as she leans against the arm of the chair opposite his, "that your cowardly plan would never have succeeded, even without the warning."

rabadash sneers at her, and not for the first time, lucy wonders how he ever conducted himself to be anything more than the ass that he is.

"narnia's high king is a fool and a craven," he scoffs. "he never would have attacked the great land of calormen and my father, the tisroc, may he live forever, over something so trifling as a mere sister."

this is not his first mistake, but he is lucky that it isn't his last. lucy's face goes very still and very stern, and rabadash glimpses for one terrifying moment why the narnians all call her valiant. why she is named for the sea, the harsh and changeable mistress, and the flowers that grow back first after wildfires.

"i wasn't actually talking about peter," she says, her voice chillingly light, all pretense and formality dropped, "though if you think he wouldn't have marched on tashbaan to save our sister, you're a much bigger fool than i thought."

her tone makes it perfectly clear just how much of him she thought, and it certainly wasn't very highly at all.

she strides forward to stand before him, which would be a very foolish thing to do in a company of an unbound and dangerous prisoner if that prisoner were braver than rabadash and lucy were anyone else, and leans down to meet his eye. she's not very tall, queen lucy, and yet to him she seems like a giant—terrible and beautiful in an entirely different way than her sister. she's so close he can see a long white scar on her neck, can smell horse and leather and chainmail and clean sweat, can see how her hair is bound back for convenience and not beauty, and her hands are rough and capable.

he is aware, suddenly, that he is afraid. that perhaps he has been since she entered the room.

"know this, son of tashbaan," says queen lucy the valiant, and the smile on her lips does not at all match her eyes. "if you had laid even the tip of one finger on my sister, the queen, i would have skinned you alive."

she leans back just enough for him to breathe, and he gasps with it.

"and do you know what?" she asks cheerfully.

he doesn't want to know. she tells him anyway.

"i really don't think peter would have stopped me."

Susan did not see Peter in battle for years—arriving to his stand against Jadis almost too late, catching up while he picked himself up from the torn earth, on the other side of the conflict when the remnants of Jadis’ army tried their luck at the Cair. Sure, she knew he fought and killed, just as she did, just as Edmund and Lucy did—and oh, how Susan loathes that last part, but Lucy had been the one to find the first assassin in their halls and there was nothing to be done about it now. There was entirely too much death in their first year, Susan thinks, the fairytale shine of Narnia soon breaking apart and leaving a country and people in desperate need of rest and time behind. It took her days to get the blood out underneath her and Lucy’s fingernails, and she knew Peter had just as bad a time with Edmund next door. With a lump in her throat, Susan wondered often if this was to be the rest of their lives: washing themselves clean of battles that were forced upon them by a world far too big for their hands to hold. But even then, with the bloodied waters between them all, she never truly saw Peter in battle. A slain Maugrim who had about as much a part in his own death as Peter’s shaking sword did, a witch that Susan never saw die, assassins that ended up on the moth-eaten carpets she had found in old storage rooms; things that should give her pause but she simply couldn’t consider for long with all there was to do. They had killed to end up where they were, and Susan knew deep down that they would have to kill to stay, too. Now, standing with her bow held tight and a quiver empty of arrows, a sword at her side she has yet to finish learning how to swing, Susan finds herself in a pocket of tar-slow time. Here, she stands with a muddied hemline and their castle once more under siege—unknown foes, but foes all the same—and there, across the way, with his hair longer than Susan has ever known him to have, Peter lets out a roaring laugh. Rhindon is far out of sight, a glaive taking its place in Peter’s steady hands. Even from afar, Susan feels it in her bones when Peter’s swing launches an enemy’s torn body across the field. There are bodies, horror-frozen faces, the stench of blood and bile. The steps to the Cair will perhaps forever bear the stain of this assault. They have lost people they held dear. Susan has wept enough to fill an ocean. And Peter laughs. With storm-eyes, bloodied tongue, and bared teeth, her older brother wages joyous war.

well look who it is. my old friend. the conses of my quences.

That’s one of the headcanons I have as well!!!!

I think he didn’t want that recording of him singing to ever be played — and if the song was changed then the hologram made no sense to be shown ever again. Too many memories in the original anthem.

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one! That's a really good point, too. I hadn't thought about the hologram. That makes it even more likely, in my mind, that he changed it for a purpose!

it's always "immortals always lose the ones they love!" and never "this family has had this incredible, powerful, loving figure present through generations of their lineage, all because they are descended from someone the immortal loved long ago" and i think that's a shame!!

A character concept that I'm actually surprised I haven't seen more, now that I think about it:

A character with a tragic past who's beautiful in an unthreatening, pitiful sort of way, who goes "wait hold on, people think I'm cute?" and immediately goes drunk with power. Having a whole villain arc getting corrupted by the power of being just so tragic and pathetic that people can't be mad at them. Someone who's been accustomed to always being the one who's blamed and punished no matter whose fault the problem was suddenly discovering that actually they could get away with murder by being so big-eyed and sad.

And once they figure out that they can just Poor Little Meow Meow their way out of anything, they do. Going from being genuinely skittish and timid into pretending to do so merely as an act, manipulating the shit out of everyone and avoiding all suspicion because Look How Sad And Wet And Pathetic I Am, of course they couldn't do any harm to anyone ever.

And if one person finally does see right through that act and puts puzzle pieces together of how there's been just too many suspicious coincidences and accidents that only one person would actually benefit from, they confront the Tragic Little Act directly, one-to-one, to say "I'm fucking onto you and your shit"

And suddenly they completely snap out of their timid, pathetic presentation to give a big, wide, sickening smile like "no-one's ever going to believe you."

2nd of October: Light / An dàrna latha dhen Dàmhair: Solas

English Translation:

Thorin knew beauty, perfection, could recognise the mark of true craftsmanship with ease. Though still young in the years of Dwarves, he studied at the side of their greatest smiths, deep in the halls of Erebor before the dragon came, and learnt the true meaning of creation.

The forges of Men lacked skill and care; working on them brought him no satisfaction, only a pittance in his hand and scorn on the road. Reaching the Blue Mountains was a relief to his people and to Thorin but they did not relish to live on the charity of others.

Their prince would not forget the glory and honour they came from. They established halls of their own in the west and raised themselves out of ruin, enough that many among Thorin's folk lost all desire to seek for their lost homeland again.

For their sake, and the sake of his siblings, Thorin spoke little of it - choosing to look ahead rather than live looking back. It did not stop the dreams or the memories, nor quell his anger. Never again will we be beggars, turned from the door like animals.

Oft did Thorin go among their smiths, seeking the familiarity of a hammer in the hand and the heat of the fire on his face.

But eyes the light of the Arkenstone had seen could not easily forget its radiance, nor find equal in dull and dusty gems. In his dreams, it lay buried beneath the dragon's paws, forever in the dark within walls once strewn with firelight.

The Arkenstone. The heart of the mountain, they called it. He held its light closely, tightly, and allowed his hope to live on in its glow.

(Sorry this one is shorter, I'm working tonight and don't have a lot of time to translate it!)

Scottish Gaelic Translation:

Bha Thòrin eòlach air àlainneachd, snas. Dh’fhaodadh e ag aithneachadh comharra fhìor cheàirde gu furasta. Ged a bha e òg fhathast ann am beatha nan troichean, dh’ionnsaich e ri taobh na goibhnean as motha a bh’ aca, anns na h-uaimhean ìsle, aosmhoire Erebor mus tàinig an nathair-sgiathach, agus dh’ionnsaich e am fior ciall chruitheachd.

Bha na ceàrdaichean gun sgil is nàistinn. Cha tug e toileachadh dha a bhith ag obair orra idir. Cha d’fhuair e dad ach priobaid na làimh agus tàir bhuapa air an rathad. Nuair a ràinig iad na Beanntan Ghuirm, b’ e faochadh don t-sluaigh aige agus ris fhèin, ach cha robhar measail air a bhith a’ fuirich air carantas.

Cha dhìochuimhneach am prionnsa a’ ghlòir is onaraich a bh’ aca. Thog iad tallachan dhaibh fhèin anns an Iar agus thog iad fhèin a-mach à lom-sgrios. B’ e sin gu leòr dha tòrr dhen t-sluaigh Thòrin a bhith gan caill am miann a bhith a’ sireach an tìr-dhàimh aca a-rithist.

Air an son, agus air a phiuthar is a bhràthair, cha bhruidhinn Thòrin mu dheidhinn gu tric. Choimhead e air adhart seach a bhith beò a’ coimhead air ais. Cha do stad sin na h-aislingean, na chuimhneachain, no chuir mùch air a fhuath. Cha bhith sinn nar dìolachan-dèirce a-riamh a-rithist, feumach air taic mar gun robh beathaichean a bh’ annainn.

Chaidh Thòrin gu tric a-measg na goibhnean aca, a’ sireach cinnt dhen t-òrd na làimh is teas an teine air an t-aodann. Ach cha b’ urrainn sùilean a chunnaic solas an Arkenstone dhìochuimhneachadh an deàrrsaidh no lorg an aon rud ann an leugan luaireanta, ràsanaiche. Anns na aislingean bha i adhlaicte fon smàg an nathair-sgiathach, anns an dorchadas, ann an tallachan a bha air lìonadh aon uair le solas an teine, gu sìorraidh brath.

An Arkenstone. Cridhe na Beinn, chuir iad oirre. Ghlèidh e an solas faisg, gu daingean, agus leig a dhòchas a bhith beò anns a deàrrsadh.

(Duilich gu bheil am fear seo nas beaga, tha mi air a bhith ag obair a-nochd agus cha robh àm gu leòr agam airson eadar-theangachadh a dhèanamh! Bidh mearachdan ann a sheo agus bheir mi sùil a-màireach air haha)

Let me get this straight Barnaby. This is a man who was being blackmailed for taking advantage of one of the troubled girls he took in. He admits that he paid the blackmailer. He admits that he was worried about what people would think. He admits that he was going to go meet the blackmailer and accuser.

But he is innocent and she made it up because she's a bad seed (even when she says "don't tell me what John Waverley deserves").

Say, if it was true why would she have told you given you threw her into jail for 84 hours all up, told her John Waverley deserved better and told her he was a good man and you don't ever want to see her again?

We're supposed to ignore all of that and believe he is innocent and take in the moral of the story about how false accusations ruin people's lives on the grounds of *check's notes* John Barnaby likes and respects him. Cool cool cool cool.

The ache will go away, eventually. 

That was what the Professor told them, the day they got back. When they tumbled from the wardrobe in a heap of tangled limbs, and found that the world had been torn from under their feet with all the kindness of a serpent. 

They picked themselves off of the floorboards with smiles plastered on child faces, and sat with the Professor in his study drinking cup after cup of tea. 

But the smiles were fake. The tea was like ash on their tongues. And when they went to bed that night, none of them could sleep in beds that were too foreign, in bodies that had not been their own for years. Instead they grouped into one room and sat on the floor and whispered, late into the night. 

When morning came, Mrs. Macready discovered the four of them asleep in Peter and Edmund’s bedroom, tangled in a heap of pillows and blankets with their arms looped across one another. They woke a few moments after her entry and seemed confused, lost even, staring around the room with pale faces, eyes raking over each framed painting on the wall and across every bit of furniture as if it was foreign to them. “Come to breakfast,” Mrs. Macready said as she turned to go, but inside she wondered. 

For the children’s faces had held the same sadness that she saw sometimes in the Professor’s. A yearning, a shock, a numbness, as if their very hearts had been ripped from their chests.

At breakfast Lucy sat huddled between her brothers, wrapped in a shawl that was much too big for her as she warmed her hands around a mug of hot chocolate. Edmund fidgeted in his seat and kept reaching up to his hair as if to feel for something that was no longer there. Susan pushed her food idly around on her plate with her fork and hummed a strange melody under her breath. And Peter folded his hands beneath his chin and stared at the wall with eyes that seemed much too old for his face. 

It chilled Mrs. Macready to see their silence, their strangeness, when only yesterday they had been running all over the house, pounding through the halls, shouting and laughing in the bedrooms. It was as if something, something terrible and mysterious and lengthy, had occurred yesterday, but surely that could not be. 

She remarked upon it to the Professor, but he only smiled sadly at her and shook his head. “They’ll be all right,” he said, but she wasn’t so sure. 

They seemed so lost. 

Lucy disappeared into one of the rooms later that day, a room that Mrs. Macready knew was bare save for an old wardrobe of the professor’s. She couldn’t imagine what the child would want to go in there for, but children were strange and perhaps she was just playing some game. When Lucy came out again a few minutes later, sobbing and stumbling back down the hall with her hair askew, Mrs. Macready tried to console her, but Lucy found no comfort in her arms. “It wasn’t there,” she kept saying, inconsolable, and wouldn’t stop crying until her siblings came and gathered her in their arms and said in soothing voices, “Perhaps we’ll go back someday, Lu.” 

Go back where, Mrs. Macready wondered? She stepped into the room Lucy had been in later on in the evening and looked around, but there was nothing but dust and an empty space where coats used to hang in the wardrobe. The children must have taken them recently and forgotten to return them, not that it really mattered. They were so old and musty and the Professor had probably forgotten them long ago. But what could have made the child cry so? Try as she might, Mrs. Macready could find no answer, and she left the room dissatisfied and covered in dust. 

Lucy and Edmund and Peter and Susan took tea in the Professor’s room again that night, and the next, and the next, and the next. They slept in Peter and Edmund’s room, then Susan and Lucy’s, then Peter and Edmund’s again and so on, swapping every night till Mrs. Macready wondered how they could possibly get any sleep. The floor couldn’t be comfortable, but it was where she found them, morning after morning. 

Each morning they looked sadder than before, and breakfast was silent. Each afternoon Lucy went into the room with the wardrobe, carrying a little lion figurine Edmund had carved her, and came out crying a little while later. And then one day she didn’t, and went wandering in the woods and fields around the Professor’s house instead. She came back with grassy fingers and a scratch on one cheek and a crown of flowers on her head, but she seemed content. Happy, even. Mrs. Macready heard her singing to herself in a language she’d never heard before as Lucy skipped past her in the hall, leaving flower petals on the floor in her wake. Mrs. Macready couldn’t bring herself to tell the child to pick them up, and instead just left them where they were. 

More days and nights went by. One day it was Peter who went into the room with the wardrobe, bringing with him an old cloak of the Professor’s, and he was gone for quite a while. Thirty or forty minutes, Mrs. Macready would guess. When he came out, his shoulders were straighter and his chin lifted higher, but tears were dried upon his cheeks and his eyes were frightening. Noble and fierce, like the eyes of a king. The cloak still hung about his shoulders and made him seem almost like an adult. 

Peter never went into the wardrobe room again, but Susan did, a few weeks later. She took a dried flower crown inside with her and sat in there at least an hour, and when she came out her hair was so elaborately braided that Mrs. Macready wondered where on earth she had learned it. The flower crown was perched atop her head as she went back down the hall, and she walked so gracefully that she seemed to be floating on the air itself. In spite of her red eyes, she smiled, and seemed content to wander the mansion afterwards, reading or sketching or making delicate jewelry out of little pebbles and dried flowers Lucy brought her from the woods. 

More weeks went by. The children still took tea in the Professor’s study on occasion, but not as often as before. Lucy now went on her daily walks outdoors, and sometimes Peter or Susan, or both of them at once, accompanied her. Edmund stayed upstairs for the most part, reading or writing, keeping quiet and looking paler and sadder by the day. 

Finally he, too, went into the wardrobe room. 

He stayed for hours, hours upon hours. He took nothing in save for a wooden sword he had carved from a stick Lucy brought him from outside, and he didn’t come out again. The shadows lengthened across the hall and the sun sank lower in the sky and finally Mrs. Macready made herself speak quietly to Peter as the boy came out of the Professor’s study. “Your brother has been gone for hours,” she told him crisply, but she was privately alarmed, because Peter’s face shifted into panic and he disappeared upstairs without a word. 

Mrs. Macready followed him silently after around thirty minutes and pressed an ear to the door of the wardrobe room. Voices drifted from beyond. Edmund’s and Peter’s, yes, but she could also hear the soft tones of Lucy and Susan. 

“Why did he send us back?” Edmund was saying. It sounded as if he had been crying.  

Mrs. Macready couldn’t catch the answer, but when the siblings trickled out of the room an hour later, Edmund’s wooden sword was missing, and the flower crown Susan had been wearing lately was gone, and Peter no longer had his old cloak, and Lucy wasn’t carrying her lion figurine, and the four of them had clasped hands and sad, but smiling, faces. 

Mrs. Macready slipped into the room once they were gone and opened the wardrobe, and there at the bottom were the sword and the crown and the cloak and the lion. An offering of sorts, almost, or perhaps just items left there for future use, for whenever they next went into the wardrobe room.  

But they never did, and one day they were gone for good, off home, and the mansion was silent again. And it had been a long time since that morning that Mrs. Macready had found them all piled together in one bedroom, but ever since then they hadn’t quite been children, and she wanted to know why.

She climbed the steps again to the floor of the house where the old wardrobe was, and then went into the room and crossed the floor to the opposite wall. 

When she pulled the wardrobe door open, the four items the Pevensie children had left inside of it were missing. 

And just for a moment, it seemed to her that a cool gust of air brushed her face, coming from the darkness beyond where the missing coats used to hang.

Obsessed with Merlin's main defense against getting caught as a warlock is that everyone else thinks he's incompetent