"...I, um, I think Tom can probably already tell I'm not interesting. But you can tell him anyway if you want."

"...I don't mean it that way," Edmund says. 

After a few seconds of awkward silence:

"He thought I was interesting."

"...?"

"I - we met at school - and I made an impression - and he. He rewrote me. I can't - I love him. But. I think... it's best for him... if he doesn't do that to anyone else."

He inhales. Exhales. "So. If I keep his attention... away from some people... it's not about whether I think they're. Interesting. It's. Well. Call it jealousy. He won't need anyone else with me around."

"...oh," she says quietly. "I—but I really do think you are just correct, if you tell him I'm not interesting. I'm not... I'm only here because I'm the Slayer. There's not anything interesting about me."

"I'm not sure what the Slayer is, but - I've never met someone who wasn't interesting. At least a little. And I think you're - trying not to be, but I see the sparks."

"The Slayer is a girl with magic vampire-fighting powers who's supposed to save the world from all the things that are trying to end it. Turns out that's a lot of things," she says. "It's—a big responsibility. I don't think I'm very good at it. World hasn't ended yet, though, so I guess there's that."

"How long has it been you?"

"Three years. Since I was fifteen."

"If I'd been told I had to save the world when I was fifteen I'd have killed myself. I could barely handle living in a palace, learning magic and manipulating politically inclined badgers. And you've been fighting evil for three years? Thanklessly, less I miss my guess."

"Mostly it is not very hard! I have magic vampire-fighting powers, I punch the vampires, they fall down, I stake them. Sometimes the Watchers tell me I have to go do something important and I go and do the thing and then go back to punching vampires. If it required special expertise the world would have ended at some point in the past several thousand years of the power getting passed to an untrained fifteen-year-old whenever the previous Slayer died unexpectedly."

"It doesn't have to be complicated to be hard on you."

"...I guess. I don't know. It's not—it's not the sort of thing where—I'm just not used to thinking of it that way. Mostly I think about how untold numbers of untrained fifteen-year-olds across all of human history have managed to do this job and I have the best help out of all of them because the Watchers only accumulate more institutional memory and expertise with time and yet, somehow, I keep screwing it up."

"The world hasn't ended yet, and you're still alive. Maybe you're doing better than you think."

"I think that if I were doing well, people wouldn't be dying of my mistakes."

...well.

They walk in silence for a while, exiting the dorm building into a courtyard. Rather than go directly to the dining hall, Edmund sits on a nearby bench, gesturing Chantal to join him.

"I'm going to tell you a story I haven't told anyone. Tom doesn't count, because he read it out of me himself."

"Okay."

"When I was ten - actually ten, not just looking like it - my sister went through a portal into another world. It was called Narnia. She met a faun, and she had a lovely time, and she came back to us and we didn't believe her because that's not how magic works. I went through the same portal the next day, and I met - a woman. She was beautiful, and... she bewitched me. Not any kind of magic I'd heard of before, just - I wanted to make her happy, and I'd do anything to make it happen. I promised to bring my siblings to her castle, even though I think I knew that she meant us no good. And - I tried. But they were too clever for me, so I ran back to her. She was... angry. She hurt me. She was going to kill me, but Aslan's army rode in and rescued me."

His eyes are shining. "And... they brought me back to my siblings, and I told them I was sorry, and they told me that everything was alright, even though it wasn't. And then the Witch came and told Aslan that I was a traitor, and that by the Old Laws she had every right to me. And he told her she was right. But then he said that if she relinquished her claim then he would give himself over to her instead. And she did. And she tortured him to death on the Stone Table, a sacrifice to make herself stronger."

"Aslan... came back. Killed the Witch. She hadn't accounted for some loophole in the Old Laws, and he had. But." Edmund swallows. "That doesn't mean he didn't die because of me. He talked to me, before that battle where he killed the Witch. Told me... By my grace, you live. For your sins, I died. Were it not for me you had been damned. Remember always what you owe. Live for me; go forth and sin no more. And for fifteen years, I did. I remembered what I owed. I lived for His grace."

"But when Tom was fixing me up for himself, something about that... came loose." He smiles tightly. "Stopped pretending to make sense. I stopped believing that it was a ten-year-old boy's fault that he was hurt by a grown woman, that it was his fault that his god lay down and died for him. I stopped being able to believe that. And I don't think it's a teenage girl's fault if she's not a perfect soldier. If she can't singlehandedly stop every bad thing that happens in the world, without anyone suffering for it."

He closes his eyes. "You don't have to forgive yourself," he says. "But - you don't have to forgive yourself to know that it's not your fault that you're not God. And if no one's told you that, then they hurt you. And that's not your fault either."

"Oh."

"...do you want a hug."

"I would not turn down a hug."

She hugs him. Very very carefully, like he's a baby bird, or perhaps like she hasn't experienced positive human contact since before she had superstrength.

This does not surprise Edmund in the slightest. He hugs her back with all the strength in his skinny preteen frame, and he rubs her back in circles, and he cries a bit.

"It's... it's because I'm the Slayer, right," she says haltingly. "It's because I can, I'm supposed to, I have a responsibility because I—because it's within my power. But. You are not more powerful than God! If he wanted something about that interaction to go differently he should've done something different about it!" She ventures the softest of squeezes. "And, I, I guess, maybe, it's not always in my power either—" whoops now she's bursting into tears, how did that happen.

"You have a responsibility," Edmund agrees, hoarsely. "You have to try. And - I know you have."

Tiny sniffly sobs as of one who understands on a bone-deep level that she is not supposed to be seen crying.