#i love polly so dearly. i have a million wishes for her life between MN and LB | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

queenlucythevaliant · 3 months

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under the wings

1. Polly would always always always remember the feeling of falling asleep beneath Fledge's feathered wings.

2. She'd been curled up close to his side with his coverts over her shoulders like a shawl. His pinions had stretched past her to break the night winds. She'd leaned into the crook of his wing, feeling softness on her cheek. When she turned over in the night, feathers brushed her from all sides, whispering against her skin.

3. If Polly could have wished for one thing, at twelve, at twenty, at sixty, it would have been the same: to live in that memory. If she might, she never would have emerged from her place beneath Fledge's tawny wings.

4. She loved her smuggler's cave because it was safe and small and hers. She loved all kinds of nooks and closets, window seats and beds with curtains and covers she could crawl under.

5. Digory never understood it. He himself liked wide open space and covering skies. "It's the same concept though, I think," Polly remarked once. "There's something lovely about the feeling of being underneath."

6. Polly was even, unfathomably, rather partial to certain bomb shelters, though she'd never have admitted it. How pleasant it was to fall asleep underground, curled up in a corner wrapped in a blanket, safe in the knowledge that she was too far down for anything to hurt her.

7. (And when she wasn't in a shelter and the bombs fell anyway, she squeezed her eyes shut and pictured tawny feathers all round her.)

8. Digory wrote her letters and she wrote back. His were full of ditches in the ground and hers of shelters, but they both liked to write about lions and the sky.

9. After the first war, it was easy for a pretty lady to talk her way into flying lessons with one of the hundred wayward pilots left over from the fighting.

10. He was a mechanic by trade, and he didn't mind unconventional women; but he told Polly she had no business in a cockpit if she didn't know her way around an engine. So, two summers after the war ended, she spent her mornings smearing oil across her ruffled blouses and learning how to make things fly.

11. (She would have married him, if ever he'd asked her- but he never did, and maybe it was for the best.)

12. As the years wore past, Polly met other little girls with ribbons in their hair. She told them stories and she taught them her magic, and when they cried she brought them into her hiding places the same way she'd once done with Digory Kirke.

13. They called her Aunt Polly - both those children that she cared for interbellum, and the ones that came after.

14. Once, Polly dreamed that it had been her instead. Aslan told her, you will be the grandmother of all the angels, and feathered wings sprang from her back. Once, Polly dreamed that it had been her instead of Fledge.

15. (She woke with the feeling of feathers still clinging to her shoulders, itching.)

16. During the second war, she worked at an aerodrome. Occasionally she flew with the training crews, but mostly she'd go out onto the tarmac after the sirens were done and stand in the shadows of airplane wings.

17. When Digory told her about the wardrobe, Polly went to his estate, pulled out all the coats, and shut herself in. She didn't have any notions of getting back to Narnia that way-- but she did it all the same.

18. Jill and Eustace made her laugh: Eustace, who hated heights, and Jill, who panicked in small spaces. Oh Lord, thought Polly, save me from the irony. She loved them anyway.

19. In the end, she died in a train crash and opened her eyes to something like fragrant, golden feathers.

20. And suddeny, Polly understood. They're weren't really Fledge's wings at all, were they?

#at long last i have returned to revising these character study pieces #i love polly so dearly. i have a million wishes for her life between MN and LB #this doesn't all connect together as well as i had hoped it would but hopefully the idea still comes across #my dear adventuress #game if you are #pontifications and creations #narnia #leah stories #edit: i lost point 15 somehow when i posted this lol but i fixed it

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