"Please," says Isabella, after a moment to catch her breath, a moment to recognize the child next to her, "please - tell me you remember that?"

She scrunches her eyes shut and covers her face with her hands.

"Argh," says James. (Deep breaths, come on, this isn't helping, it's just she's too mad to talk.)

"Oh thank -" Aslan, she almost says. She doesn't particularly feel like thanking Aslan right now. Maybe she will again when she's had more time to think. "Oh good." Squeeze.

"I'll get there," mutters Isabella. "When I'm done c-crying. I'm ten! I'm ten and I can barely walk and you're eleven and - and we have accents now! And I have parents and you have an aunt and what are we supposed to do?"

"Yeah. They had child monarchs once and they can do it again." Isabella lurches to her feet with considerable effort and tries the door. Coats. "Awkward that my sex drive isn't due back until I'm like thirteen -" She plows through coats, wobbling.

"...okay," says James. "That's... that's better than it could be."

"Maybe there's other things," says Isabella, shoving the wardrobe for another look behind it. She peeps under it, too. Nothing.

James attempts to shove the wardrobe too, to get better light to look behind it with. It's very reluctant to move, perhaps because she is currently a not very athletic eleven-year-old. She scowls at it.

It occurs to Isabella to check the interior of her notebook. She plops down on the floor, flips through it, sighs relief; dog-ears a blank page, closes the book, opens it again to the dog-ear; "It works."

"Good. Ugh." She glares at the wardrobe, but doesn't kick it again.

"I'm going to - look more places. Coat pockets and stuff." Isabella goes back in the wardrobe and checks the pockets and hangers of each coat.

"Yeah. So. I guess we just... go back," says James. "I don't even know if I want to tell Chris. I could, if you showed her the notebook, I'm pretty sure she'd believe us..."

"...I didn't even live here. Most of the time. I lived in Arizona."

"Okay, point in favour of telling Chris: it'll be really easy to convince her to move to Arizona if she knows why."

"I could probably convince my parents if I had to but Charlie's definitely not moving if I remember him as well as I think. And Renée might move but not to here or anything. So that's still a gap every year, but we can live with that, I guess."

"Yeah."

"We have accents. I'm not sure I can even affect an American accent on purpose now, it's been so long." She coughs. "I have definitely spent the last ten years in the United States," she attempts. It's not too terrible.

"I don't think I can do it now but I can probably get used to it again after I spend some time around people who have spent the last ten years in the United States..."

"I don't remember if I wrote it down." Isabella flips through her notebook. "No, I just have speculation about what would happen when we we were found missing, not when or how."

"It hasn't been weeks but it might have been days... we should probably go wait in front of the house," says James. "And maybe try to go back from there, but I'm not sure I remember the way."

"I don't remember either and never drew myself a map," sighs Isabella. "Yeah. We'll have to say we lost the stuff we brought, I guess."

"Yeah. 'Lost it where?' 'Well, we're not sure, that's what happens when you lose things.'" Sigh.

"Do I have a list..." Isabella does have a list. "Okay, I don't remember any of this being horribly expensive, they probably won't refuse to let it just be lost."

"I'm not sure how we could've managed to lose it in the first place but I guess we're ten and eleven and not expected to be that responsible about what we do with borrowed things."

"I guess. I don't want to have to lean on that too much but we can't produce the backpacks, so." Pause. "We have to go to school. With other ten-and-eleven-year-olds. We're going to have to ask permission to go to the bathroom. And I could probably convince Renée to homeschool me but I legitimately need the re-acculturation."

"...I might convince Chris to homeschool me... I won't if you'd rather have me there as an ally against the genuine Earth schoolchildren," says James.

"Maybe there's some less humiliating way to re-acculturate? We could... watch a lot of movies."

"We could do... activities... of some kind... I'll ask Chris," says James.

"Are you going to ask her what it is that Earth schoolchildren do, or just say you're bored...?"

"At this point I think I'm going to have to explain the whole thing and then ask how to be a minimally inconvenienced Earth schoolchild."

"So - I'll go with you and prove and corroborate things for that and decide from there, I suppose."

"Yeah."

To the front of the house to sit and wait.

"Yeah. We were careful."

"It still happened near it, so maybe it's just that whole area, but Winter tried and didn't get anywhere..."

"Maybe it - wanted us. And didn't want him."

"Maybe. We didn't wander around there before so it's hard to say if it had any timing opinions..."

"Yeah..."

"It could have stood to wait until we had some kind of succession plan. I don't know who's going to take over now." Pause. "Unless the time difference is - inconsistent or something? If it waited any longer our respective adults would have thought we were dead?"

"Maybe. Maybe we should be trying to come back here once a year to see if it'll let us back in yet."

"Yeah. Although - you went there and back a few times first. It was never longer here than there. If we go back after fifty years they'll have figured something out, I wouldn't want to threaten someone who was holding things together. If they're holding things together... ugh."

"I don't know - I mean, I wouldn't want to start a civil war, but Narnia doesn't seem like it would go to civil war over this. If we go back and someone is holding things together, we appoint them official crown prince or princess and then cooperate with them. You know?"

"Yeah... Maybe there's something we're supposed to do here? Besides be not-dead for our respective families, I mean, I can't imagine that would be the sole factor..."

"I don't know. It's hard to say."

"And I don't know if it's autonomous lamp post transport or - or Aslan himself -" Pause. "His name doesn't quite work anymore."

"...Yeah. It feels - I can't tell if I'm feeling it or just remembering what it felt like," sighs James.

"Yeah."

"I'm going to - take up fencing or something, I don't know," James decides. "So I don't forget."

"Yeah. Archery's a sport, I think, I think it might be in the Olympics? And - and I'll get a real calligraphy set because my pen didn't come with the book. I'll get a camera."

Nod nod.

"There are people who do horseback riding. None of these skills are really... useful... here but I don't want to just lose them."

"Yeah. We can do horseback riding and you can do archery and I can do swords."

Nod.

"There are more people here. But none of them want to put crowns on our heads and do what we say nearly as much. And we didn't exactly bring back revolutionary secrets."

"I mean, if I somehow became the monarch of a smallish country on Earth I bet I could do pretty well... but the problems are different here. And there's much less, I don't know... Narnian-ness. It would be harder than ruling Narnia."

"A lot. People manage it, more or less, without Narnia-related practice, but I'm not positive that the experience will stand us in particularly good stead even if we do wind up ruling - I can barely remember what countries there are. Spain. Whatever."

"And we're probably not going to end up ruling Spain."

"Probably not. Don't even speak Spanish."

"Yeah."

Isabella sighs and looks at the driveway. It's asphalt, she remembers the word "asphalt"...

"It was Chris. I'm pretty sure. She's more tractable than most grownups, it would've been easiest to get her to be the one to drive us out to the abandoned house."

"How long would she have expected us to find it interesting? On the assumption that it doesn't contain an unreliable portal to a magical kingdom."

Sigh. "Who knows..."

"Yeah... maybe find a hole to have accidentally dropped all our stuff down."

"Only if it's really inaccessible and they won't try to retrieve the can opener or anything."

"Maybe find several holes. To not be sure which one we accidentally dropped all our stuff down."

"I was carrying everything, I tripped," snorts Isabella.

"Yeah."

James tries to remember how to move like she is eleven. She hasn't needed to do it in a while.

The house doesn't have any backpack-sized pits.

How inconsiderate of it.

"It just seems so completely obvious to me that there's no way we could possibly have lost that stuff in this house. But I guess most people won't be inclined to look that hard."

"Maybe we wandered around in the woods? There wasn't all that much house."

"Okay. We wandered around in the woods and... dropped all our stuff, for some reason. And couldn't find it again. I am really not impressed with these hypothetical versions of us."

"Thought we saw a bear."

"Sure."

"And I can barely run anyway and I dropped everything to have a better chance."

"Reasonable. Hypothetical Isabella gets a pass."

"That's fine. I can have a weird nickname."

"Okay."

Smile.

Lean.

Hug.

"I might just want eight hours with your notebook to write down everything in the Narnia files. If I'd written down everything in the Earth files right when you got the notebook, we'd have it in front of us now."

"You can have it. Soon as we have a pen."

"Thanks."

Pensive snuggles all round.

James realizes that she managed to forget what Chris's car looked like. Since Chris's car is a black-and-white Mini Cooper, it should really have been harder to forget than that. It comes back to her as soon as she sees it, but... she sighs unhappily.

"Hm?"

"I'm annoyed that I forgot what kind of car Chris had," she says, getting up and proceeding to the car. Her hand remembers how to open the door even if she doesn't.

"Now, I know it's been a while, but I seem to remember you kids having backpacks when I dropped you off," says Chris.

"We lost them."

"It's kind of a long story," says James. "I'm not sure if we should save it for when we get - home or not."

"How far is it, again?"

"We went through a magic door and saved a kingdom from an evil witch-queen and then spent the next fifteen years ruling it," says James. "I'm twenty-six now."

"Whatever spat us back out let me keep my magic notebook. So there's that for proof if you don't want to put us in separate rooms and get coherent too-complicated-to-be-rehearsed matching stories of the last decade and a half."

She hasn't started the car yet. "All right, let's see the magic notebook."

"It has personal notes in it along with stuff I don't mind sharing. It'll open to whatever page you want," says Bella, "so be careful of that. Go find, um, the knighthood ceremony photo album, that'll be a nice spread." She hands it over.

...Chris looks for the knighthood ceremony photo album.

It has James knighting various creatures as captured by the photo card thing. In chronological order. Some of them are relatively recent.

"Yeah. It did not work," says James. "The magic door is broken, or not accepting visitors at this time, or something."

"Do you remember if it worked consistently before you brought me along?"

"I think so... if I'm remembering right, it was a door every time I walked into it, and the back of a wardrobe every time I stood outside and stuck my arm in. But I only went through a handful of times. For all I know it had a limited number of uses... I don't feel like that's right, though."

"Limited uses seems out of step with how magic items typically behave there, anyway, I don't know if it's different since the wardrobe is on this end."

"I... haven't seen that many magic items in my life," says Chris, handing Bella back her notebook, "but I'd be surprised to find a magic door that worked exactly four times and that's it."

"I have a magic chess set. It's not good for much and I've never been able to find anything else that was verifiably magic."

"It sure would've been nice to know that when I was considering saving the magic kingdom of Narnia from its magic evil queen," James says dryly.

"Yep."

"I didn't want to tell you about my useless and inexplicable magic chess set until I found a use or an explanation. It would've been nice to know that you were considering saving the magic kingdom of Narnia, but I can see why you didn't tell me."

"So what's the plan? Who else are you going to tell?"

"I don't know about my parents yet. The notebook's pretty proof positive, but I think they'd be upset. The problem is I'm not sure I remember being ten or American or anything well enough to mimic it consistently. I may have to let them continue to send me to school just to reacclimate."

"Elizabeth?"

"...well," she says, "for one thing, I've spent the last fifteen years going by James."

"...Huh," says Chris.

"If it wasn't for Isabella I might want to be homeschooled, but I don't want to abandon her to face the genuine Earth schoolchildren alone. And there's value in seeking out normal experiences for the country we'll be living in."

"But I live in Arizona during the school year."

"I can move to Arizona."

"That'd - that'd help."

"Consider it done."

"...Congratulations," says Chris. "Sorry I missed the wedding."

"There's pictures."

"I'll have to look at them sometime. Maybe not now, though. Now I think we should be working out a plan for your immediate future and then heading home."

"Yeah." Sigh.

"So I'll move to Arizona, and you and - James - can go to school together - are you going to want to change your name? Or anything else?" she asks James.

"My legal name can stay. I don't have a problem with being a girl for most purposes and I think I'll be happier if I grow up into the same body I had the first time around. But between me and people I'm close to like you and Isabella, yeah, it's James."

"Jamie."

"All right. Is that enough to be going on with?"

"For now, yeah. I'll probably wind up playing it by ear with Charlie, see if my accent slips or something."

Being in a car again is WEIRD.

It kind of is, yeah. After a minute, James reaches over to hold Isabella's hand.

Handholding! That's better.

It is.

"Of course," says James.

"Would bringing my magic chess set into it help anything?" wonders Chris.

"Yeah, maybe. That way it looks less like a couple of kids played pretend and decided to pretend harder."

"Sure, then. Although I think I'll leave the actual chess set at home."

"Yeah, for physical proof the notebook should suffice."

Drive drive drive.

Charlie takes a minute to answer the door. "Hey, Bells," he says. "Elizabeth, Chris."

"Hi," says Chris. She looks at Isabella, seeking cues about whether she should be the one to start explaining.

James had to stop holding Isabella's hand to get out of the car and is now not quite sure whether to start again.

"It's complicated. And hard to believe. You may want to sit down."

"Elizabeth and I went to explore the abandoned house by the edge of town and in it we found a portal to another world where time runs differently. We were there a decade and a half. We grew up. Then it spat us out back into our previous bodies later the same day we left."

"I believe them," volunteers Chris. "Bella has a magic notebook, there are pictures, it was very convincing. And I already knew magic existed; I have a useless and inexplicable magic chess set."

Bella looks for a comparable set of pictures of her, over time, the way the knightings make a good sequence for James. She comes up with a series of photos of her on Queensday, hands the notebook to Charlie.

He looks them over. "Are these - photos -?"

"Magic ones. I had a thing that took pictures and would transfer them to paper. I don't have any of my stuff except the notebook now."

"We helped overthrow the witch who was ruling the country and we took over in her place."

(James smiles, wistfully. They were such a good King and Queen of Narnia.)

"...oh, and I go by Isabella now."

"Yeah?"

"...if you want to call me Bells you can, just, introduce me as Isabella."

James decides not to introduce any of her own name-related complications to this conversation at this time.

"We couldn't get back," Isabella goes on, "so here we are, but I'm not really ten, anymore."

...Okay, that seems like it went pretty well. Good for Charlie.

"Also we're married. Chris is probably going to move to Phoenix so we don't have to be apart most of the year."

"It's kind of awkward being ten and eleven again," says James.

"It really is. Dad, if you are concerned about the thing I think you are concerned about I don't expect it to come up for like four years minimum."

Awkwaaaaard.

James observes that she has the urge to tell Charlie he's holding up pretty well, and then observes that she feels like telling him that principally because he isn't holding up as well as Chris did and so his basically adequate reaction feels more impressive because it seems less effortless.

Charlie looks down at the notebook in his hands. "Can I - are there more pictures?"

"Yeah," she says, "but it has infinite pages, it's kind of a trick to find some of them, here -" And she takes the notebook back and finds more pictures. Scenery and creatures and historic events and their wedding.

Wow, that was a pretty nice wedding.

Yep.

Eventually Bella runs out of pictures to display. "...I'm very hungry," she observes.

"I've got food." He glances at Chris and Elizabeth. "You want to stay for dinner?"

Chris looks at James.

James nods.

"Yeah, sounds good."

Food is assemble-your-own-sandwich. Charlie makes bacon.

It is not particularly Narnian, but Isabella puts some of most of the things on at least one of the two sandwiches she makes and reacquaints herself with the contents of a delicatessen.

James sits near Isabella and eats food and is quiet. She is not used to feeling this kind of uncertainty, and she does not like it one bit.

Isabella hooks her ankle around James's.

Sugar cookies are good. Isabella is also good.