National Service

Fanfiction
Title:	National Service
Author(s):	burntcopper
Date(s):	2008 - 2015
Length:	63,541 words, 7 works
Genre(s):	gen, action/adventure
Fandom(s):	Chronicles of Narnia, Crossover
Relationship(s):
External Links:	AO3; 1, 2, 3, and 4 on burntcopper's personal site (via Wayback); series on LiveJournal
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

National Service is a Chronicles of Narnia fanfiction series by burntcopper centered on the Pevensie siblings in World War II, later a crossover with Torchwood and Good Omens. It was posted on Archive Of Our Own beginning in 2011, but was originally written beginning in 2008, when the first work was posted to LiveJournal.

Main Series

Might Shape Up Well centers Peter Pevensie as a member of England's army after the events of the Prince Caspian film and is just over a thousand words.

Judge His Reactions is an Outsider POV on Edmund Pevensie and his recruitment to secret service. It's barely longer than the first.

Original Suspicious Bastard is another Oustider POV, this time from Peter's men on the brothers during and around battle. It's a thousand-and-a-half words.

A Thin Veneer of Civility takes place during the war's offtime, when Peter and Edmund are asked by Peter's men to fence. It's close to two-thousand words.

Putting the Natives at Ease focuses on the Pevensie children's father, a veteran of the First World War, learning of his sons' brutality, and is more than two-thousand words.

The first four works were written in 2008, but the fifth was written in 2010.

Companion Works

The Shadows Feel Like Home drastically departs from the style of the first five works as it follows Susan Pevensie's recruitment to and work for Torchwood Cardiff. It includes Edmund in a supporting role beginning in the second chapter, as a liason for MI6 to Torchwood, and has sexual and romantic relationships between Edmund and Jack Harkness, Bacchus, and original characters. Lucy joins the cast in the fourth chapter as a medical doctor. Aziraphale and Crowley, the leads of Good Omens, are introduced in the fifth chapter, but are not recurring characters. Peter joins in the sixth chapter and is portrayed as being attracted to Jack, as his siblings are. The work is seven chapters and fifty-two thousand words long.

Too used to being listened to is an AU of National Service, in which Edmund does not join the secret service and instead takes up a job at Aziraphale's bookshop, which leads into his romance with Bacchus. It's three-thousand words.

The first companion was posted in December 2012 and the second in 2015.

Podfics

The main National Service series was adapted into a podfic series by croissantkatie in 2012. The first two works are tagged as 0-10 minutes and the last three as 10-20 minutes. They're posted on Archive Of Our Own as a series.

Reactions and Reviews

Full Series

They are all gen, which after all of that hullabaloo over incest and taboo and whatnot might seem strange. But trust me. If you are into this fandom at all, or just read the books as a passing fancy when you were a kid, I'd still give these fics a go. Wonderfully delightful, gritty and evocative.

An ongoing series, but each story is complete and there are no cliffhangers. Movie-canon. The series offers an amazing look at what it would mean to have the memories of feudal warrior-kings and -queens, but inside a young body in mid-20th Century England.

I love how this story/series is told from the perspective of people outside of the kids. It's cool to see how their lives appear to people who don't know anything about Narnia, Aslan, or where the kids (now youn men and women) learned to be fighters and leaders. The comparason between Edmund and Peter is particularly interesting. Burntcopper does a great job of showing the signs of both their king-ships without loosing the differences in their personalities and beliefs. The ending to the series is a bit abrupt, and I wish there had been more closure, but the series is strong and well written even without more world-building. It's a great read for anyone who likes outsider POVs and war stories.

This series is everything amazing and perfect and wonderful with the world. It gets the perfect combination of funny and dark and above all, realistic- the real effects that waging wars and leading countries would have on someone, and how that change in personality might play out back home.

A serious and somewhat chilling but realistic look on how Peter and Edmund's fighting skills might have influenced their later lives in our world. I love it.

I have read this series a lot and there is just something about the Pevensies being violent and getting to see them from an outsider view, and older that is just awesome. Your stories that I read got me to thinking about them being older, and what that would mean for them. At first I wondered if I would be as thrilled as I was used to seeing them as kids( In the books it really skims over them as adults) but by reading this series I fell in love with the idea. I also fell in love with the idea of them being in England and considered so strange by outsiders. But even with seeing them by outsiders, they seemed so in character for how they had been in the book ,and how you imagine them to have been in mediaeval times. Peter calm in battle and a take charge attitude. Edmund cool and fair along with being bloody evasive. Susan a diplomat with a stubborn nature, and Lucy the scary nurse that likes to laugh.

So thank you for getting me hooked onto a new way of looking at the Pevensies, the more violent and grown up Pevensies. I find myself wanting to write them violent and grown up now (oh the violence stories that could shock my friends. haha) I look forward to anything else you write. Thank you for a wonderful series.

I don't usually read Narnia fics (I'm not in the fandom, I never read the books, and to be honest, I became increasingly ambivalent to the movies as time went on, mostly because of the incredibly apparent religious metaphor. As an atheist, it makes me uncomfortable), but I'm so glad I took the change and read this one, as it deals more with the aftermath of Narnia than the actual events that occurred there.

This series couldn't be farther from the flavor of canon, but it has a profound point to make. The Pevensies return from Narnia equipped with the skills and mentalities that once allowed them to lead Narnia's transformation from a few bickering villages into an empire of peace and prosperity. But the modern world views those skills very differently and not at all as assets. The Pevensies are so utterly capable, clearly the ideal of a warrior king, but to the modern outsider, they appear sociopathic. The characterizations in this series are absolutely, exquisitely chilling.

These fics have a wonderfully mid-20th century feel, showing the clash between the Pevensies’ Narnian sense of adventure, and the more straitlaced attitude of post-war England. I loved the shorter stories at the start, illustrating Edmund and Peter’s alarming confidence as seasoned warriors and kings, working alongside normal young men.

Might Shape Up Well

Just cannot even articulate how much i love this series of stories, but especially this one. Just the gorgeous, spare but incredibly descriptive writing, I can almost hear the fæies buzzing myself, and this is what started me down a mad rabbithole of post-narnia stories, because thinking about what happens to the Pevensies BACK in Britain is so much moren interesting than almost anything else written about them, at least the way you write them, thinking about what their skills and experiences would actually mean in modern society. Amazing! Thank you for sharing!

Putting the Natives at Ease

And, God, don't get me started on that last one. I couldn't imagine being one of those parents. To have children who defer to their eldest brother all the time, or speak in riddles involving unicorns and broadswords... Not to mention the 'air' around them that the writer speaks to: they act as though they're doing you a favor, instead of merely complying. Christ. To hear from someone else's mouth that your son is a savage bastard killer? The same son who has held the youngest daughter and brushed dirt from his younger brother's face? It leaves me feeling heartbroken and uneasy.

A friend of mine rec'd this, and I've just gone back and read everything in this universe (at least, everything under your "national service" tag) and I'm seriously so in awe of this fantastic series of stories! I love the way all of the siblings are still so normal with one another, completely preserving the way they learned to relate to one another in Narnia, but they're so out of sync with the rest of the world. I love the way Peter and Edmund fall into old fighting habits together, and how Susan can still command Peter's attention. And I loved the tiny glimpse of Lucy - I really want to see more of her! I mean, it's bad enough with the older ones who are young adults, but how would the world take a child who is that world-wise and self-possessed?

The Shadows Feel Like Home

This is with out a doubt one of the best stories I have read this year. Seriously do you know how excited reading this has left me, I am just positively giddy. What a marvelous crossover and you executed it brilliantly! It's nice to see Susan find her own place, what with the time period she had limited options to shine it's nice to see you provide the opportunity. Makes me curious what her brothers or even Lucy would think, that they supposedly had the most exciting jobs and now Susan the gentle is going around facing off against aliens. Blimey I am just smitten with this fic. Also I love how you characterized Susan it was very fitting to with her cannon self how you portrayed her, particularly in speech. The ending was my favorite despite being impressed with her previously, she suddenly reveals even more hidden depth with the way she just took charge. How you wrote about Jack struggling not to salute, automatically obeying, it give me the most wonderful mental image of Queen Susan with Jack as her faithful knight. I mean I loved your other stories with Edmund and Peter but this one was next level as far as I'm concerned, I just had to comment and tell you how pleased I am you decided to both write and share this. Smashing job, shame I can only leave kudos once.

I enjoyed them all but this is my favourite. It is well worth reading the much shorter (one chapter) previous stories that build up to this one. It's a crossover, but the focus is very much on the Pevensies and how the very traits that made them such excellent monarchs in Narnia are seen so very differently, and mainly negatively, in modern times. As such National Series series can be seen as a dark albeit often very funny series.

is a fun and fast-moving fic that explores the idea of a Pevensie family that survived post Narnia and what they would do if they fell into the Torchwood Continuum. Particularly what the younger three Pevensies would do with Jack Harkness.

Usually in Torchwood fics Jack is seen as this kind of imovable force because he’s lived so long, so it is interesting to see him run into a bunch of young adults that have lived multiple lives in multiple worlds and don’t give him any kind of respect he doesn’t earn first.

The plot is pretty much episodic and it moves quickly to the point that sometimes things get forgotten along the way but it is tons of fun if you are looking for a bunch of capable, irreverent, damaged people saving the day

chibifukurou

Podfics

Narnia isn’t one of my fandoms and I’m not sure why I originally listened to this but it’s well worth it. “Everyone's children came back from the country changed,” the Pensevie parents recalled, “They were older, for a start. Some of them were wilder, some had no manners, some had been turned into country children with not a trace of London in them, complete with accent… The Pevensie children, though, came back... odd…They were polite, well-mannered to the point of cautiousness, but you always felt as though they were looking right through you, with eyes that had seen more than even the soldiers who came back hollow-eyed.“ Burntcopper uses Peter and Edmund’s national service to explore what it looks like to outsiders when you’re a experienced military commander before you finish school. The setting is the British army in the Malayan Emergency (Americans should probably envision the Vietnam war but set in the 1940s) and burntcopper does a very nice job with the class and imperial tensions. Croissantkatie’s voices and accents work well for me in supporting the story (though I admit I wouldn’t have any way to judge their accuracy).

Inspired Works

• Know Them By Heart and Pay No Attention to Appearances by frostedarsenic on AO3 (2018)
• they took the crown by cryingunderwater on AO3 (2020)
• The Pevensies by sehruncreative on AO3 (2020)