"...yeah. Realizing I hadn't for a while is... yeah. I used to pray every night before bed, did it for as long as I remembered, before. Until the day I stopped."

"Like Wile E. Coyote. There will come a day when your sins are forgiven, there is someone above all who loves you more than you can know, the arc of the world bends towards love, et cetera... until you look down and it all puffs into smoke."

She thinks about it. "Until you look up, I suppose."

"I think that the thing with—" He pauses, then shakes his head. He shouldn't bring up Travelers. It would've been half a lie anyway. "It's hard to move on, but I think I'd been going in that direction for years, really. When I realized it I wasn't... surprised. I didn't believe ninety percent of it. Not hell, not miracles, not really. I realized that I wasn't going anywhere, afterwards." After dying. "Not really. Not where they said I was going. I didn't feel it, didn't expect it, I said the words but I didn't trust them."

"Heaven was never really it, for me... but I know the feeling."

She leans her head back, knocking it lightly against the pew. "What a conversation to be having with someone I met two days ago. Though I suppose I should grade myself on a curve; I haven't yet proposed mashing our faces together, so I'm in good shape among Pevensies."

"I'm sure it'll have to be me who proposes it though I would be very flattered if it weren't.

"But, you know, that said, I feel like that's kind of how you make friends? Share weirdly intimate things about yourself before you're totally sure they'll land and then when they do, bam, that's relationship escalation for you."

"You know, if that's how you do it, it sort of explains your success with my brothers. Excessively intimate details are like their cocaine."

"I kind of noticed it! Fits well with me, I have made more than one person uncomfortable by misjudging that. What's your cocaine, then?"

"Oh, same thing. We're all fiends for it except Lucy, who thinks that excessive intimacy is almost nothing like victory in battle, and therefore irrelevant."

"Victory in battle... I can see it, from the five seconds I've interacted with her for. Though something like that is not not Peter's thing, even if the angle is different."

"We are related, you know. Lucy's got Peter's righteous determination, Ed's got my nosiness, I've got more than a few neuroses in common with Peter myself, Ed and Lu are both incorrigible gremlins..."

He grins. "...now that's making me miss my siblings, I should message them."

"Of course you should. Reports from their sister abroad: flirting outrageously with everyone in arm's reach, hiding from Anglicans in the chapel, did something to poor Jonesey that's got him practically spinning with frustration..."

Their sister... Pete's not sure how to feel about that one. It's one thing to have "she" used as a pronoun, but that one... hm. He'll have to think about it.

He's almost certain Susan will notice the hiccup. "Friends in High Places" probably doesn't cover whatever it is that the Pevensies have clearly got going on, here, even if he's trying.

"I don't flirt with everyone in arm's reach, or at least not outrageously. I'm more selective than that. I've no idea what it was that I did to Jonesey, though."

Mildly apologetic smile, as if Pete needed confirmation. "He may just be suspicious of your immediate success with Edmund. He held the prior record on acquiring Ed as a duckling, and he had the natural advantage of a much smaller version."

"Oh, that. Yeah, hopefully I can be relentlessly nice and well-intentioned and that'll cover both his suspicions and yours."

"I'm not actually very suspicious," she says quietly. "I joke, but... they've been lonely for years. Always, maybe. It doesn't surprise me at all that they'd leap into your arms. And maybe that means you'll hurt them worse if you let them down, but. You have to live even if it kills you."

"Surely someone has tried this before, though, you're all smart, driven, interesting, drop-dead gorgeous people, has no one shown any interest?"

"Ed is too neurotic to notice or accept anyone's affections unless beat around the head and neck with them. Peter has found some perfectly legitimate reason to deny everyone to show an interest thus far, and when someone pushes past and leans on him, he retreats into his burrow. You're persistent without being... insistent, I suppose."

"Huh. Well, I'll take it, you're right that they definitely look like they could use a friend or two."

"They've got friends. What they need is... someone who will prioritize them."

"A best friend or two, then," he says, grinning. But then he turns a bit more serious. "I—hope for more, but I can't, you know, promise for sure. If nothing else we might go up in flames despite our efforts."

"Guarantees aren't really what I'm looking for. I just want you to try to be good to them, and I'm –- trying, however incompetently, to gesture at how you can. That's all."

"Yes, ma'am. I'll do my best."

"What am I supposed to say to that, then? Good boy?"

"If we're flirting by apophasis then I could say I'd flutter my eyelashes and grin bashfully if you did."