Work Text:
you’ll come back when they call you
no need to say goodbye
❅
Susan doesn’t remember she has a mother until the evening after the return.
It’s not that she doesn’t think she has a mother. Everyone has mothers, and she and her siblings had to have come from somewhere. But in Narnia, their mother wasn’t there. In Narnia, there were so many other things to worry about, to see, to love. To rule, too. There wasn’t much time to think of mothers or fathers or wardrobes in spare rooms.
And maybe, if Susan’s honest—maybe they didn’t want to think about it. Maybe it was easier that way, to spend those first few days, weeks, months promising themselves they’d go back to England sooner or later. (None of them noticed they’d stopped calling it home, even then. Not even Susan.) She and Peter used to talk about it from time to time, but by the second summer of their reign, they just—stopped. It seemed like a dream more than anything, and then not even that.
Now they’re all two feet shorter and fifteen years younger and forgetting they don’t have to speak in the royal we anymore, and Susan can remember that she has a mother, and that mother’s name is Helen, but she cannot remember her face, no matter how hard she tries. When she thinks of their father, she finds herself picturing Peter instead, except it’s not Peter’s face anymore. He left his beard and his cheekbones and the lower timbre of his voice behind in Narnia, along with the look in his eye that sometimes reminds Susan why Aslan named him for the North, for the mountains, for the vast and empty sky. War did that, she thinks. War and kingship.
It's still there, sometimes—that look. It’s there when she least expects it.
She wonders if their father will have the same look when they see him again.
She wonders, too, if she’ll recognize his face. If he will recognize theirs.
Then Lucy comes and pulls her out of her thoughts and her bedroom, and Susan manages to forget such things for a time.
But only for a time.
❅
(In Narnia, forgetting was as easy as breathing sometimes.
In England, it feels like the opposite is true.)
❅
The night after they get back from Narnia, they all sleep in one bed—the one in Peter and Edmund’s room, and it feels like a lifetime since Susan saw it last. Probably because it has been for her, and for all of them. But here, it has only been a day. No, not even that.
It’s hardly big enough for all of them, even in their old and smaller bodies. Peter has to keep one arm wrapped around Lucy so she won’t roll off the edge, and Edmund’s elbow digs into Susan’s ribs all night long. Still, none of them complain. None of them want to leave. None of them want to be alone.
It’s been years since they all shared a bed. Susan has almost forgotten what it’s like, lying in the dark and listening to Lucy’s snoring, Edmund talking in his sleep. He never stopped doing that, even as an adult.
They used to do it sometimes when they were younger, or when things got bad. As bad as they could be in Narnia, that is, which was both more and less terrible than Susan might have imagined for a wild world where she was queen.
(The night after their coronation, after they danced until dawn and got sick on strawberries and honeysuckle and blackberry juice and joy, they all curled up in one great heap of limbs and velvet on the floor of Susan’s chambers. She woke up sweaty and tired with one arm twisted so tightly in her cape it tingled for twenty whole minutes after, and she couldn’t roll Peter off of her legs so she could get up to pee no matter how hard she pushed, and she was also the happiest she’s ever been.
Sometimes, Susan wonders if it’s the happiest she’ll ever be, too.)
The night after the battle for Narnia; the night of the coronation; after Rabadash and after Peter took that terrible blow in his raid on the giants and only just pulled through long enough for Lucy and the rest of them to arrive with her cordial—all those were nights they spent together, curled into one another, noses in hair and hands on arms and ankles tangled under the covers. All those nights, they closed ranks against whatever thing threatened to take one or all of them; to tear their family apart. It never fixed anything, but somehow it always helped.
Tonight, though, Susan’s not sure if it will. She’s not sure anything can.
She’s still awake when she hears Lucy sneak out of bed, tiptoeing away down the hall. She knows her sister is going to the wardrobe, just as surely as she knows that there’s little point in doing it. And when Edmund goes quiet next to her, Susan knows he’s awake as well, and she knows him well enough to guess where he, too, is going when he slips out the door after Lucy just a few minutes later.
She also knows that there’s nothing she can do to fix any of this. Of them. They’ll come back in a little while, and when they do, Susan will be here waiting. Susan has always been good at waiting. At staying. That’s something she didn’t lose when they tumbled back out of the wardrobe this morning.
So much, she thinks, for any of them resting, because Peter’s awake, too. She can tell by the forced evenness of his breathing, the too-still curve of his spine. She half-expects him to get up and go after Edmund, following after Lucy. To leave Susan here alone, keeping the bed warm and the hearth fire burning just like in Cair Paravel before and before and before. He doesn’t, though, just turns over onto his back after four and a half heartbeats, after two ragged breaths.
When Susan rolls over to face him, however, she sees something she doesn’t expect.
Peter is crying.
It’s been so long since she last saw him cry that she’d almost forgotten what it looks like.
Peter the Magnificent rarely wept where anyone could see him, and to be honest, he rarely had a reason.
Peter Pevensie, however, cries like this: quiet. Unassuming. Pained. If Susan couldn’t see the gleam of wetness at his temples in the moonlight, she might not have known he was crying at all. She can, though, and that makes all the difference.
“Peter,” she whispers. It sounds like a gunshot in the quiet of the bedroom.
Funny—she’d forgotten about gunshots, too.
“I’m fine,” her brother lies, like she can’t see the tears or hear the ache in his voice, the very same one that burrows between her ribs true as one of her own arrows. “Really, Su. Go back to sleep.”
She sighs. “I miss it, too, you know.”
Peter says, in a rather strangled sort of voice, with nothing of the king he was just yesterday left in it, “Don’t, Susan. Please.”
But when she reaches out across the rumpled sheets between them, he reaches back. He takes her hand and holds it tight as he held the hilt of his sword from Father Christmas, all those years ago when he faced down the wolf to save her.
Rhindon, he’d named it. Spring’s Tooth.
Susan doesn’t suppose she’ll ever see him hold it again.
Here is a truth, terrible though it may be: she’s not entirely certain that’s a bad thing.
❅
She doesn’t remember falling asleep. She doesn’t remember Edmund or Lucy coming back, either, but they must, because when Susan wakes with morning sunlight across her face, Lucy’s sprawled on top of Peter, his face tucked into her hair, and Edmund’s burrowed between him and Susan so he’s lying on top of their still-joined hands.
It’s uncomfortable and cramped and far too warm to be doing this. Still, Susan stays. She stays and she watches over them until Mrs. Macready’s sharp-voiced summons and rattling of the door rouse the rest of them and call them down for breakfast.
She doesn’t say anything about Lucy’s midnight foray, though Edmund wraps an arm around their little sister’s shoulders as they slip down the back stairs to the kitchen, which says enough on its own. She doesn’t say anything about Peter’s still-splotchy face, either.
That’s how it goes, in the beginning—and for ever so long after it. Susan and the things she doesn’t say.
❅
When Susan walks in the woods, her hair doesn’t catch on any branches anymore. The brambles don’t stick to her clothes. Her socks are never wet.
Mrs. Macready hasn’t shouted at them for tracking grass down the halls for weeks. They aren’t trying not to, Susan knows. The grass of their world simply doesn’t stick to their shoes anymore, and the leaves won’t catch in Susan’s hair, but somehow when she combs her fingers through it, there are always flowers there. Edmund’s shins never seem to bruise no matter where he bangs them, and Lucy’s always going one branch higher than she should be able to climb by rights.
Susan used to hate it when her hair caught. When it tangled.
Now she almost misses it.
❅
It’s not so bad, not at first. Not while they spend the summer at the Professor’s, at any rate. He believes them. He’ll play chess with Edmund and listen to all of Lucy’s stories about dancing trees and fauns and Aslan, and he takes Peter seriously when they talk about the war over dinner. He tells Susan she can come to him if she ever needs anything and gives her free rein of his personal library. When she asks if she can use the harp in the green room upstairs, he says yes, and she spends hours blistering her fingers on the strings.
It reminds her just enough of her bowstring that the hole in her chest feels less like a hole and more like a fist, tightly clenched where her lungs should be.
It won’t last forever, though. Eventually they’ll have to go back to school. Eventually they’ll have to be normal, and Susan’s afraid she’s forgotten what normal is like here in England. Certainly it’s not a little sister who chatters on to the birds like she’s forgotten they won’t talk back, or one brother who talks like a politician and another who still carries himself half-soldier and half-king. It’s not humming songs this world has never heard, nor feeling more at home with leaves overhead instead of a roof. It’s not knowing every star in a sky that isn’t hers anymore, or a dozen courtly dances she’ll never have need of again.
Susan is stuck eternally reaching to straighten crowns that none of them are wearing, braiding her hair and finding it a yard shorter than it used to be; picking at new-formed callouses on fingers that haven’t felt this tender in years. She didn’t want to be a queen at the start, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t learn to love it. She was good at it, too, and so were her siblings.
They all grew up together, grew into themselves and into Narnia both, and now they’re just children again. Their skin doesn’t fit quite right, like trying on an old favorite jumper and finding it’s one size too small. Susan’s head remembers the weight of her hair, Peter’s shoulders the heft of his armor. Their voices are too young but too deep, words solemn, eyes old.
It can’t be like this forever, Susan knows.
Something’s got to give.
❅
Here is a secret: sometimes, Susan wonders if this is all her fault. If she fought them harder at the lamppost, if she’d never gone with them after the White Stag—perhaps they’d still be in Narnia.
She’d tried, certainly, but not hard enough, even in spite of the tightening in her chest, the way the overgrown clearing loomed heavy on her mind. In the western woods, Queen Susan saw the tree of iron, and she felt like a little girl. She saw the lamppost, and she was afraid.
But more than that—now that they’re back in England, back to things like electricity and radios and indoor plumbing, away from wars on giants and men who would have her hand, sometimes Susan wonders if she didn’t want this all along. If the Stag hadn’t caught her wishing, even when she didn’t notice it herself.
❅
Time goes by. It moves slower than in Narnia, and not nearly as sweet. Eventually, they have to go back to London, and back to school. The rest of them are so disappointed that Susan keeps the relief she feels to herself. They don’t have to present a united front anymore, she knows, but everyone knows what they say about old habits.
She is glad, though, to be going back. Maybe if she’s somewhere else, somewhere more familiar, she’ll start feeling like Susan the girl again, not Susan the Gentle, Susan of another world. That Susan melted away like hoarfrost under the morning sun and left a gap-toothed, gawky girl behind. That Susan feels like a dream, and this Susan worries sometimes it was a bad one.
The day before Mrs. Macready is set to drive them back to the station, it takes Susan a good two hours to realize she hasn’t seen Lucy since breakfast. She checks their bedroom and the garden just for show before she heads to the place she’s meant to look all along.
Sure enough, the door to the wardrobe stands open just a crack, and when Susan tugs it out the rest of the way, she finds her sister sitting among the coats with her knees drawn up to her chin, which wobbles just a little when she looks up at Susan from the floor.
“Oh, Lucy,” sighs Susan, and then, of course, she climbs inside herself.
It’s a rather small wardrobe, all things considered. She has to tuck her legs in very tightly, so that she knows she’ll feel the ache of it later in her ankles and knees and calves. Susan’s not sure how the four of them ever thought they’d fit inside it when they didn’t believe Lucy about how you could get into another world through the back.
“I want to go home,” Lucy whispers into her knees. She sounds smaller than Susan’s heard her in years—Earth-years and Narnian both.
“We’ll be there tomorrow,” Susan says.
Her sister sniffles very quietly. “That’s not what I meant.”
Susan tries to think of something to say that might help and comes up empty-handed, heavy-tongued. She murmurs, “The Professor says we might yet.”
Lucy leans her head against Susan’s shoulder so that she feels more than hears her sister’s sigh. It’s heavier and more sorrowful than any eight-year-old ought to be, but then, she wasn’t always eight. Of all of them, Lucy’s slipped back into childhood the easiest, but there is still too much of Narnia in her—in all of them, perhaps—to be truly happy in England.
“I just don’t understand,” says Lucy very softly, “why Aslan would let us leave like that. We never even got to say goodbye.”
There’s nothing to be said about that, really.
They sit on the wardrobe floor as morning fades into afternoon, their arms draped round one another, and they don’t talk about it. Susan hums snatches of songs she remembers from the midsummer festivals, and sometimes Lucy joins in, harmonizing perfectly. Eventually, the others find them, as Susan knows they will. First Edmund, then Peter slipping in beside them.
There really isn’t enough room for all of them in the wardrobe. There never was.
They make it work anyway.
❅
(This is the first time that Susan thinks, inexplicably, unprompted, preemptive: I’m going to miss this one day.
It’s a mercy that she doesn’t understand how much.)
❅
A year passes. They hug their mother tight at the train station back home, even Edmund—though none of them think like that anymore, after everything. They relearn things like the Underground and neighborhood streets and war rations and setting the table for dinner. They go back to school, and it’s not terrible. Not for Susan, that is. Lucy has to stay home while the rest of them head off to boarding school, which means Peter has Edmund but Susan’s all alone at Saint Finbar’s, and honestly, she doesn’t mind it that much. Girls at school can be awfully cruel if they think you’re a queer sort, and Lucy still talks to animals out of habit and slips up mentioning Narnia and those sorts of things more often than the rest of them.
(Talking about magic with one’s siblings is all well and good, Susan thinks, but she agrees with what Professor Kirke told them before they left his house in the country: that they oughtn’t go round telling just anyone about Narnia.)
And truthfully, a little shamefully—though she misses her siblings while she’s away at school, sometimes it’s just easier to be on her own. To be Susan the schoolgirl, not Susan the big sister, or Susan the sensible one who keeps her brothers in line and sets the table every night, or Susan who was once a queen. Certainly, she’s still all of those things, but when she’s at school, she can pretend for a little while that she’s not. It’s somehow easier to slip back into her old life when there aren’t any reminders of Narnia there to haunt her.
They spent the entire summer hoping they’d go back, and they never did. Now, months later, Susan is beginning to think that maybe they won’t, or at least not for a long time, and perhaps she’d better get used to the idea of England again, for her own good. It’s better than setting herself up for disappointment, after all.
The others don’t see it that way. Lucy writes her letters full of rambling mentions of Narnian memories, and Edmund writes her letters to say that Peter’s been getting into fights, and Peter doesn’t write her any letters at all, just hasty postscripts at the bottom of Edmund’s, sending his love but also a newfound sense of distance.
Susan feels like she’s losing them sometimes.
She thinks she might be losing herself, too.
❅
They all dream of Narnia, of course. Peter with clenched fists, Edmund with furrowed brows. Lucy whispers Aslan’s name in her sleep, and it’s only sometimes through tears.
And Susan?
Susan dreams of losing Lucy in the roar of the Great River. Of Edmund half-dead on the battlefield. Of Aslan cold to the touch, and older but still-young Peter with his head in his hands as he sits in an empty throne room, alone. Of Rabadash and the Tisroc and the leer of every man who wanted her, of her brothers cut down and her sister turned to stone, of her father somehow dead on a Narnian battlefield and her mother weeping beside him in fear.
When she wakes from them, gasping, she finds herself thinking that perhaps her problem is not what she can remember, but rather what she cannot forget.
❅
She watches it eat at them as surely as it eats at herself. They aren’t allowed to read the newspapers at home—they’ve got to go out to the newsstands to do that, and even then people tell them they’re too young. Edmund chews his lip as his opinions are dismissed and Lucy withers a little more each time someone laughs at her for her optimism.
And Peter?
Peter can’t let go any more than the rest of them can, but he does what none of them dare. He lashes out. He chafes under dismissals and sneers and childish bullying he used to try to ignore. He has the look of a king about him still. On a man, or in Narnia, perhaps that might not be so terrible. On an English schoolboy, it’s rarely a good thing. Susan can’t remember the last time she saw him without bruises, bloody knuckles, split lips and sore ribs. He is taller and prouder and terribly angry, and though she knows the wound the anger stems from, the grief at the heart of it—still, it frightens her.
“You’ve got to stop doing this,” she tells him one afternoon, dabbing at a cut on his forehead where a boy twice his size got a solid kick in. He’s lucky it’s only a cut. Peter never was as much of a brawler as Edmund, and that was before he lost half his age and body mass but none of his foolhardy courage. “I mean, you’re scaring Mum.”
You’re scaring me, she does not say. Peter flinches as she dabs at his head again. He won’t look at her, and this, somehow, is worse than seeing him hurt.
“You’re worrying Lucy, you know,” she tries, which is a little bit like cheating and a little bit like pinching at a bruise or a particularly soft spot. Peter has plenty of both, and she knows it, but Susan just wants him to look at her. She wants her brother back, the old Peter, Narnian or not. The one who would smile and talk with her into the late hours of the night and listen to her advice and indulgently dance her around the room when her favorite song came on the wireless. She doesn’t know when she lost him, but she’s not so sure it wasn’t before they came back to England.
Peter before her is silent and stoic as a statue as she finishes patching him up. When she steps back and sets the rag down, he doesn’t make any move to get off the edge of the tub where he’s been sitting and picking at his thumbnail until it bleeds.
Susan only folds her arms and waits. She’s good at that. Peter’s not.
“I just can’t bear it,” he says at last. “I can’t.”
“Can’t bear what, Peter?” Susan demands, exasperated and exhausted and frayed-thin by constant worry.
At last, Peter looks up at her, and his eyes are as desolate as the northern wastes. He says, very hoarsely, “Any of it.”
❅
They fight about it. Susan hasn’t raised her voice since Narnia, but Peter’s always known how to press all her buttons when he really means to. They both say things they don’t mean. Susan tells him he’s being an idiot, and Peter calls her a goody two-shoes, and when she says for someone who’s meant to be a king he’s certainly not acting like someone she or Aslan would trust with a throne, he goes very pale and still and quiet, and this is worse, Susan thinks, than the anger. She didn’t think anything could be, but it is.
Peter shoulders his way past her without saying a word, his face set in a stiff, emotionless mask.
They don’t speak for a week after that.
❅
The night before they’re set to go back to school, Lucy opens the door to Susan’s room just as she’s shrugging out of her dressing gown.
“What is it, Lu?” she asks, pausing with her robe in hand. This year will be Lucy’s first at Saint Finbar’s, and she’s swung between excited and anxious all week, constantly asking Susan about this thing or that thing or are the girls at school all right, do you think? until Susan ran clean out of answers.
“We’re sleeping in Peter and Edmund’s room,” Lucy says, and holds out a hand for Susan to take, fingers rippling. She looks so much older than nine.
Susan doesn’t bother hanging up her robe. She drapes it over her bedpost and takes Lucy’s hand, turning out the light as they leave the room and step down the hall.
The boys have shifted the nightstand to the corner and shoved their beds flush. Peter looks up as they come in, and Susan almost expects him to scowl at her—they still aren’t speaking—or worse, for his expression to go as remote and closed off as it’s been since that day in the bathroom. He doesn’t, though. Instead, he nods at her, just a little, and quirks one eyebrow: his own sort of hello. She lifts hers right back, and the corner of his mouth tugs upwards, and just like that, they’re okay again.
Lucy seems to understand this as well, because she skips the rest of the way into the room and catapults onto the bed, nearly bowling over Peter, who leans out of her way from where he was spreading a blanket over both mattresses, expression amused at her antics.
“Told you,” she says to Edmund with a grin, looking at him upside down from her sprawled-out position.
“I never said you were wrong,” Edmund replies, throwing up his hands in mock surrender. Peter just shakes his head.
He sleeps in the middle so no one else will roll into the gap between the beds—(“We might never see you again, Luce.” “Oh, do shut up.”)—and Susan climbs in next to him, settling her head against his shoulder as Edmund turns off the lamp.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers so only Peter can hear.
He tilts his own head so his cheek is resting against her hair. “I know.”
“Just try to be more careful, please? For all of us?”
In the darkness, she can hear Peter swallow. She can hear his heartbeat, too, strong and steady under her cheek.
“All right,” he says. “I’ll try.”
❅
The next day she leaves her siblings alone in the station for ten minutes to browse the newsstand, and Lucy drags her back to find a knot of brawling boys with Peter at their center. For just a moment as he surfaces from the seething mass of shouts and limbs, his eyes meet hers, and he at least has the decency to look a bit ashamed about the whole thing.
Then someone throws him against a wall, and Edmund hurls himself into the fray—again—and Peter’s on the ground, getting kicked in the stomach while Lucy jostles against Susan, wringing her hands and trying not to cry—again—and Susan thinks: this is trying?
Between checking Peter for broken ribs and herding them all down to the platform, she doesn’t end up get a chance to bring up that particular broken promise. And then suddenly something is tugging at her clothes, her hair, her heart, and the station is collapsing around them, and the air smells of salt.
And then they’re back.
They’re back.
Susan forgets, just a little, how to breathe. Then her feet hit the ocean, and she remembers. She remembers. She doesn’t think she could ever really forget.
As it happens, she’s wrong about that. But not entirely, and not just yet.
❅
(I wonder who lived here, Lucy says.
And Susan, with something like dread or perhaps grief in her heart, answers, I think we did.)
❅
It doesn’t last.
It was never going to. Susan knew this, could feel it in the air and the stone and her very bones when she stood barefoot on the cracked dais where Aslan named her Gentle so many years ago—but that doesn’t make it hurt any less.
You’re happy to be here, aren’t you? Lucy asked her that night by the fire while the others pretended to sleep all around.
And Susan said, While it lasts.
“Your time in Narnia has come to an end,” Aslan tells her and Peter as they lap the castle courtyard. He doesn’t look at them. Susan wouldn’t either, if she were him.
While it lasts.
Turns out it didn’t last very long at all.
Part of her wants to demand why Aslan would do this—why he would send them away when Narnia was happy and thriving and then pull them back to fix a mess they never meant to create. Why he would have her brothers bleed for a Narnia they barely recognize, why she would have to watch Peter nearly die in a duel a thousand times more horrible than any fight he’s gotten into back home. Why he would call them back for scant and terrible days only to send them away again, this time for good. It feels more like a punishment than anything, but for what, Susan cannot fathom.
But a smaller, quieter part of her—the part that looked at the lamppost and felt something stirring within her and was afraid—is almost relieved at the thought that this is the end. No more walking on eggshells, no more sitting on pins and needles wondering if today is the day she’ll go back. Or today. Or today. Or tomorrow.
After all, they always thought coming back would mean the Narnia they knew, saved, built, loved. But now Cair Paravel is in ruins and they’ve become nothing but legends, and certainly Aslan’s woken the trees again, but Susan still finds herself wondering how long any of it will last.
“All things have their time,” Aslan says as he stands before his great door in the air. Lucy looks like she wants to cry. Edmund looks thoughtful.
Susan can’t bring herself to look at Peter. She knows what she’ll find on his face if she does—the grief, the resignation, the determination to conduct himself with grace befitting Narnia’s High King, a golden monarch from a Golden Age, instead of a boy who spent a year yearning for his home only to be told he’ll never go back there again. What she doesn’t know is what he might see on hers.
She holds her head high as she leaves Narnia for the second and final time.
Once a Queen in Narnia, after all.
❅
(Peter strides away after their conversation with Aslan, his fingers strangling Rhindon’s hilt at his side, and this is the first time in a long time Susan has seen her brother truly retreat. She wants to follow, but at her side, the Lion touches his nose to her hand and says, “Let him be, dear one. Your brother will be alright.”
“Will he?” she asks before she can think better of it. Peter disappears around a corner, a confused Caspian in pursuit. She’s not supposed to doubt Aslan—look where it’s gotten them this time—but bitterness is a small and stubborn seed inside her, like a peach pit swallowed that sits uneasy in her stomach.
Aslan says, simply, “Yes,” and Susan bites her lip to keep from saying something especially childish, such as, Are you certain? Do you promise?
He doesn’t need to promise. She shouldn’t need him to, at any rate.
The Lion heaves a great sigh and settles onto his haunches. Even sitting, he looms over her—the top of Susan’s head just comes up to his chin.
“You may lay your hands on my mane, child,” he rumbles, “if you wish.”
And Susan is surprised to find that she does wish.
Aslan’s mane is coarser than she remembers it being as a child. It tangles around her fingertips and reaches up to her forearms, and for not the first or the last time, Susan Pevensie wishes she could go back to the way things used to be. Whether she wants that to be in Narnia or in England, she’s not so certain.
“I’m going to miss it,” she admits. It’s not a lie, but somehow it still feels a little like one. “I’m going to miss you.”
“You will find me in stranger places than these, dear one,” Aslan replies, his whiskers brushing the top of her head. Susan does her best to believe him. Things are silent for a moment, and then another, and Susan knows it’ll all be over soon—them here, her in Narnia; all of it. Still, she can’t bring herself to move, to speak, to do anything to end this moment where she stands with her future before her and her hands touching but not holding the Lion by his mane.
In the end, Aslan does it for her.
“Ask your question, Susan.” He says her name as tenderly as when he first crowned her for the Sun and the South in Cair Paravel that spring so long ago. She can’t quite remember the last time he called her Susan, not daughter or dear one or Gentle or Queen.
Susan wraps her hands around a chunk of mane each, feeling the warm weight of it settle in her palms, her bones. “Sometimes,” she whispers, “I feel like it would be easier if I could just—forget any of this wasn’t a dream. Don’t you think?”
“That,” says Aslan very solemnly, “is not for me to say.”
There is a warm, wet exhalation of breath that ruffles her hair, and then a rough tongue laps over her forehead in a lion’s kiss.
“Know this, my child,” Aslan tells her. “You must live your life and live it well. That is what matters most.”
Susan’s throat is so tight she can only nod, but she doesn’t cry. Not now, and not when they leave, and not even when they get back. There is a time for all things, but now is not one for weeping. Not yet.)
❅
She’s almost relieved they have to board the train straight to school after they get back. It means there’s hardly any time at all for her to think about Aslan or Narnia or Peter pretending his shoulder wasn’t so bad so Lucy wouldn’t want to use her cordial when others needed it more. She doesn’t even know if it’s still in pain now that they aren’t in Narnia anymore. She can’t quite recall if the bruises on his face are from the battle or from his brawl in the stairway before.
When they part ways—Peter and Edmund to another train, and Lucy and Susan getting off at the stop for Saint Finbar’s—they all hug, and Edmund whispers that he’ll look out for Peter in her ear before he pulls away, even though she didn’t ask him.
She didn’t have to.
They wave until the boys are out of sight, and then Susan lifts her chin and sets her shoulders and grasps her sister’s hand.
“All right,” she says, and pastes a smile across her cheeks. “Let’s go.”
❅
This time, it’s not so difficult to go back to being an English schoolgirl. Susan’s not sure if it’s because she’s older or because she’s not going back or even because they were only in Narnia for days instead of years. It might even be some combination of all three. Whatever the reason, she’s grateful. School is hard enough as it is without forgetting the Earth is round and guns exist and it’s not proper etiquette—nor particularly easy, given her uniform—to curtsey in greeting anymore.
She adjusts. It’s odd at first, then easier. Being at school is as good a distraction as any, even when Lucy’s seeking her out between lessons, always with something to say about Narnia or Aslan or magic and such.
(The other girls make fun of her for it when they overhear. Susan tries not to let it bother her, because Lucy clearly doesn’t mind, but deep down, she hates it, and she worries she hates her sister’s blitheness, too.)
“Look, why don’t you shove off?” she finally tells Catherine Harris when she finds them at lunchtime and badgers Lucy about talking to the birds out her window. She feels like everyone’s staring at them, and it makes her cheeks feel a little hot despite herself. “She’s just a kid, Cathy.”
That shuts her up, at least for now, but it does nothing to dull the hurt in Lucy’s gaze when Catherine’s posse has flounced off and left them alone.
“Why’d you have to say it like that?” her sister asks quietly. “You made me sound awfully silly.”
“Talking to birds is silly, Lu,” Susan sighs, picking at her peas.
“Not in Narnia!”
“Well, we aren’t in Narnia,” she snaps, then bites her lip as Lucy recoils. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”
But she does.
“It’s alright,” says Lucy. It’s the first time Susan’s ever heard her lie.
❅
Susan finds that it’s easier if she talks about Narnia less, especially over the holidays when all four of them are home together. Of course, that’s exactly when everyone else wants to talk about it more, because it seems that’s what’s easier for all of them—even Peter. Maybe especially Peter.
They don’t start out leaving her out of it, but she doesn’t exactly join in, and eventually they take the hint. Most nights, Susan goes to bed while the rest of them are still awake, listening to the murmur of their voices on the other side of the wall, talking about places like Archenland and the Shuddering Wood, and about whether Caspian has got Cair Paravel rebuilt again like he and Peter talked about before they left.
When she sleeps, she dreams of lions.
❅
(“I wish I could still see the trees dance,” Lucy tells her wistfully one summer afternoon.
They’re sitting in the back garden, Susan carefully plaiting Lucy’s hair. It’s only their second week out of term, but already Susan can feel a kind of distance between herself and the rest of them, even when she talks with Peter and plays chess with Edmund and stays in the same room when they start up on the Narnian talk again.
“I wish they sang here,” she continues. “Like in—you know.”
Since their tiff at school, Lucy hasn’t mentioned Narnia as much around her. Susan’s not sure how to feel about that.
“Close your eyes,” Susan tells her impulsively, pausing her twist and twine of her sister’s hair. Lucy does. She doesn’t even ask why. “Now listen.”
“What am I listening for?” Lucy whispers loudly.
A breeze sweeps through the garden, tossing the tree boughs and rustling all the leaves. The whispering sound of it cascades over them, and Susan gives the half-finished braid a soft tug when it’s over.
“That,” she says. “They’re still singing, you know. It just sounds a little different.”)
❅
The details slip away from her the older she gets, and to tell the truth, she lets them. Sometimes she goes whole days without thinking about it, and then longer. Sometimes, she wonders if it really was a dream, or a nightmare, or a beautiful summer of make-believe.
She’s not sure what it says about her that she wants that to be true more than anything, no matter what her siblings think.
Peter asks her about it, just once.
“Lu says you won’t talk about Narnia anymore,” he begins, coming into her bedroom to sit on the edge of her bed. He got a haircut last week, shorter than he usually keeps it. It makes him look younger, somehow. “And I’ve noticed it, too.”
Susan tries not to let the open acknowledgement that they’ve been talking about her get under her skin. Mostly, she succeeds—but only mostly.
“Maybe I don’t want to,” she says, twisting her fingers together in the hem of her skirt. It’s not very mature or ladylike or composed of her to do, but she can’t really bring herself to care. No one’s here but Peter, at any rate, so it’s not like anyone will care.
There’s a certain steadiness in the way Peter gazes at her that makes her feel particularly undone. Susan finds herself afraid, suddenly, of all the things he could ask her. All the questions she can’t answer.
He says, softly, “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me why.”
“What’s the point?” Susan manages.
Peter’s brow furrows. “Of telling me?”
“Of any of it,” she corrects. “It’s not like it’ll change anything. It’s not like it’ll help.”
“It helps me,” Peter says.
“Yes, well, it doesn’t help me, not that any of you seem to understand.”
As soon as the words are out, she wishes she could take them back—but Peter doesn’t seem angry like he might have been, once. Instead, he just seems confused.
“So, help me understand,” he replies.
But she knows he doesn’t really want her to, or even if he does, he won’t like what he hears. None of them will.
“Isn’t the important thing to live our lives?” she asks at length. “To be happy?”
Knowingly, Peter asks, “Are you happy, Su?”
“I will be,” Susan replies. And Peter, for once, lets it go.
It might be the kindest thing he’s ever done.
❅
Sometimes, Susan has dreams. They’re more like nightmares, mostly, where she dreams she’s at war, in the trenches with her father, in the muck and the mire, except amidst the gunshots, she can always hear the ringing blows of swords, the screams of men and animals, taste something different on the breeze. She can never move in those dreams, as though she’s been turned to stone and doomed to watch everyone die around her, their shapes hazy and indistinct no matter how hard she tries to see them.
Sometimes, she swears she hears Peter scream.
Tonight is not one of those dreams. Tonight is not a nightmare, nor a battlefield, but something else. Tonight, Susan is dreaming of a lion.
Hello, little one, it says to her, its eyes bright with some great secret. Susan is not little anymore and has not been for years, but next to the lion, she feels tiny. She feels like a child.
Hello, she replies, and when she looks down she finds that her hands are buried to the wrist in the lion’s bright, shining mane. She frowns, considering. You’re not real, are you? You’re a dream. My dream.
The lion tilts its head. Can’t I be both?
She cranes her neck up at it, and suddenly it’s bigger than before. It’s a giant. A colossus. It’s blocking out the sun—no, it is the sun. It’s a supernova. No, she thinks, it’s bigger than that. It’s beyond her comprehension, and so it came here as a lion, as a thing she could understand, and still, she doesn’t. She can’t.
Aren’t dreams as real as you are, my child?
But I’m not a dream, Susan protests.
Aren’t you? it asks, nuzzling her forehead, and oh, she never wants to wake up. Aren’t I? Isn’t this world just a dream of a dream?
But, she says, and struggles to remember—something. There was something someone told her a long time ago, something about growing, or names, or worlds, or—
I thought, Susan manages, hands still twined in sunlit fur, or perhaps the fabric of the universe, or perhaps simply the sheets of her bed, you were—God. Aren’t you? Why would God be a dream?
And God, or maybe a lion, or maybe just a dream or a wish or a burning memory, says, Perhaps I am not enough.
When Susan wakes, she doesn’t remember what she was dreaming of. She only remembers the warmth.
❅
The letter arrives just a few weeks before they’re set to go back to England, and Susan can tell even before she opens it that it’s going to say Lucy’s been back to Narnia. For one thing, it’s addressed to Susan and Susan alone. For another, there is something older and cleaner about her penmanship, the way she writes Susan’s name with an ornate flourish. It makes her parents smile. It makes Susan tired.
And true enough, the letter is jammed full of Lucy’s story about her and Edmund and—for some reason—Eustace being swept away to a voyage on the Dawn Treader, with Caspian, who is doing quite well and sends his love to all of them.
Her letter back reads, It sounds like you’re getting on better with Eustace than you thought. Maybe it’s better you didn’t get to come to America after all, you goose! I’ll be glad to see you when we get back. Maybe we’ll even get there before this letter.
She doesn’t say anything about Narnia at all.
❅
She gets older. At some point, she finds that she’s not a girl anymore but a woman, even though sometimes she doesn’t feel it. They’ve all gotten older, but the others have gotten quite a bit closer; as close as they used to be when they were children on the summer holidays, and sometimes Susan misses it. Most times, even. But there’s very little to be done when every conversation they try to have turns into a row over things they don’t want to say, or fizzles to silence over the things that they won’t.
She plays chess with Edmund still, when she gets the chance, and Peter sends her letters while he’s away. Lucy calls her on the telephone sometimes. It’s not all bad, even when an ache opens up in her chest, a hole as big around and deep as a wishing well that’s run clear out of wishes, every time she walks in on them all huddled around a table or a sofa or Lucy’s bed, chattering away about stranger magics and stranger worlds than their own, only for them to notice her standing in the doorway and go a terrible sort of quiet.
Moving properly to London is something of a relief, after years of things carrying on that way. There are different rules there, ones Susan knows how to handle. She knows how to apply her lipstick perfectly and dress smartly so she won’t look a tool, and she knows how to handle a man or a boy or a room full of people. She doesn’t know how to handle the fact that her siblings won’t look her in the eye, all because she wants simply to move on with her life.
Probably it’s not anyone’s fault that it happened, this falling apart of her family—growing up has always stolen closeness in more ways than one—but sometimes Susan feels like it’s hers nonetheless. Probably the others think so, too. It’s not something she knows how to fix, in the end, so it just stays broken and festering, a chasm between herself and her siblings that she can never figure out how to bridge.
She doesn’t realize that on the other side, her family feels the same.
And then it’s too late.
❅
It’s like this: once, though she has mostly forgotten it, Susan was a queen. The Lion said once and the Lion said always, but always is never something that has applied to Narnia, nor to Susan, nor to Susan’s family in turn.
Let me put it this way—once, there were four children.
But not always. Not anymore.
❅
The call comes in the evening, and later Susan will look back on this day and think that the timing was the worst part of it. That her entire family could be gone in one terrible blow, have been gone for hours, and she hadn’t even known. She’d gotten coffee from a diner, gone to work, walked home, half-dressed for a date she didn’t really want to go on, all without knowing.
She picks up the phone with her lipstick half-applied and then forgets how to breathe as the officer on the other end explains there’s been a collision—a train come off its rails, ma’am, just this morning, it’s been a frightful mess—and according to the records, they need her to—
To—
Susan’s hand shakes so badly she nearly drops the phone when she hears the word bodies.
They need her to identify the bodies.
They need her to identify—
It’s too dark now, of course, the officer tells her, but if you could come to the station first thing tomorrow, that would be best.
“Of course,” Susan says faintly. She feels very, very far outside of herself, like she’s tucked up in a corner of the ceiling, staring down as her body drops the receiver and curls over herself as though kicked in the stomach. As though stabbed. As though dying.
The noise she takes a full minute to realize is coming from her own throat sounds like she’s dying, too.
❅
(The night before, Lucy called her, saying they would all be up in London on the morrow, and would Susan perhaps be able to meet them?
“I have work, Lu,” Susan told her, phone cradled in the crook of her neck, “but—would after be all right?”
“Maybe,” said Lucy, and to Susan she sounded a little bit disappointed, though she couldn’t imagine why. “I’ll— well, I’ll let you know. I promise.”
She never had. And now she never will.)
❅
That night, she dreams of a lion who simply sits and looks at her so sadly she wants to scream.
❅
They had to identify Peter by his wallet. Peter, her big brother. Peter who gave Susan the oranges out of his Christmas stocking every year because she loved them, and he knew. Peter, who stood Lucy on his feet and danced her around the living room to the music on the radio. Who did everything for them. Anything.
There wasn’t enough left of him for her to recognize.
(She thinks, deep down, that can’t be right. She’d know Peter anywhere. She’d know any of them anywhere. She’d know them blind or as babies or as very old men. She’d know them even if they hadn’t spoken in a dozen years, and she’d know them by the feel of their hands in hers alone. How could she not?)
Her parents are stiff and shattered and Susan cannot breathe, and that’s before they show her Eustace, beside his friend who she only met once or twice, or the Professor, or—oh God, oh dear God, oh Aslan—
—Edmund.
No human being should be in that shape. No sister should have to see her little brother’s face in such a state, but it’s undeniably him with his freckles and dark hair and the scar over his left eyebrow, somehow still intact, from when he and Peter got too enthusiastic playing rugby in the garden, and he fell and split his head open on a stone. There’s precious little left of Edmund Pevensie, but the scar remains the same.
She tries to reach out and touch it without thinking. To brush the dust- and blood-matted hair off his pale forehead. The officer holds her back before she can.
Susan thinks that Edmund is the worst, as she turns away from his broken body with her hand over her mouth to hold in a scream or a sob or the breakfast she barely forced down before dawn this morning. If they won’t show her Peter, but Edmund looks like this—
She can’t think about it. She can hardly even breathe.
She thinks that Edmund is the worst, but this is where Susan is wrong, because then they lead her just a few yards away and fold back one of the tarps, eyes full of sympathy Susan doesn’t want or need, and when Susan looks down she can’t help the noise that tears itself free of her throat.
Some might call it a scream, or a wail, or even a shriek. In truth, there isn’t a word for it, because there are no words to describe what happens to Susan when she sees her baby sister, not yet seventeen, lying there bruised and white and unmistakably dead.
The agony is blinding. It takes her breath away—or maybe that’s the screaming, too.
In the end, they have to drag her away, have to pry her sister’s corpse from her arms as she weeps into Lucy’s hair. Her braids are half-undone. The braids Susan taught her how to plait when they were children, though she could never do them half as well as Susan.
Lucy’s still a child, and now that’s all she’ll ever be.
They half-escort, half-carry her away because she cannot find the strength to walk unsupported. After, sitting curled over herself on a bench outside the railway yard, Susan thinks that this must be what dying is like. This must be the end. Nothing in her life has ever hurt this much, or ever will again.
She thinks she will not survive this.
She thinks she cannot.
As it happens, she’s wrong about that, because here is the thing about Susan Pevensie: once, she was called the Gentle. Gentleness is not weakness, as many might suppose. Gentleness is purposeful. Gentleness is strength, controlled.
If Susan Pevensie is anything, she is Gentle. She is strong—once and always. So said the Lion, and he knew it to be true.
❅
(Why wouldn’t you take me, too? she screams in her dreams. Why won’t you?
Things never happen the same way twice, dear one, is all the Lion ever says.)
❅
She has them cremated, and their parents buried. The funeral is closed casket. Susan wouldn’t have been able to bear looking anyway.
Afterwards, she takes a train to the North of England and watches her older brother scatter on the wind. She buries Edmund’s box under a tree in Herefordshire with a rook from his chess set. She stands knee-deep in the sea off the coast from Essex and lets what’s left of her baby sister slide through her fingers as the gulls wheel overhead, and she swears she can smell lilies on the breeze, under the salt of the sea and her own tears.
For a minute or half an hour or a lifetime in a second, she stands there, ashes on her knuckles, hair undone by the wind. And then Susan Pevensie goes home to live to rest of her life.
Her stockings are still wet when she boards the train back to London. She’s finding it hard to care.
❅
At first, she tries to go about it the normal way. She takes time off from work and spends it with her aunt and uncle. She visits her parents’ graves and cleans out their house in Finchley to sell. Nothing about it feels normal, though. Nothing about it feels right.
Six months after the accident, Susan talks to the pastor at the church she’s been sporadically attending, looking to make sense of it all. He tells her, hand on her knee, that despair is a sin.
Wouldn’t you despair, she wants to scream, if your entire bloody family died from one moment to the next? If you never knew what your sister wanted to tell you? If you held her shattered body in your arms and you hold her again every night when you sleep? They could only tell my brother was my brother by his wallet. I never got to say goodbye. How can I not despair? Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t anyone?
Instead, she removes his hand from her knee with a look that could kill—the look of a queen, not that she can see her own face—and she leaves with her head held high.
She never goes back.
She’ll find god and meaning on her own time, Susan decides.
In stranger places, she recalls, though dimly, than these.
❅
She lives, simply put. She lives, and she lives well, after a point. It is not easy nor Gentle nor particularly Magnificent. It is certainly not Just. But it is Valiant, and brave, and sometimes it is terrible, too. There are beautiful days, and there are days when Susan wishes she, too, had been on that train, or that she had taken one step and another and another into the ocean with her sister’s ashes in her hands. That she’d just kept on walking until she wasn’t anymore.
Sometimes, Susan looks into the mirror and sees her mother’s face looking back. Sometimes, she can’t remember what her mother looked like at all. More often, all she can see are Edmund’s freckles, Peter’s eyes, and the future Lucy will never have.
Sometimes, Susan dreams of lions, and eventually, she remembers why. She’s not certain she ever truly forgot, no matter how badly she wanted to.
(All things have their time, Aslan said. And so too did forgetting have its purpose.)
Sometimes, when the breeze picks up, before a storm or beside the sea, in the little house on the coast that she buys, she swears she smells Narnia on the wind.
❅
Later, after many years and many stories, Susan’s own ends like this: she does not remember dying, though she remembers that it doesn’t hurt. One moment she closes her eyes in England, and the next, she opens them to the widest sky she’s ever seen, to standing knee-deep in sweet water with lilies all around. She feels different, somehow. Not exactly younger. More herself, perhaps, or simply more.
Before her on the shore, there is a lion. There is the Lion.
Somehow, without really trying to move, Susan finds herself standing in front of him, hands trembling with something that might be hope.
“And then,” the Lion says, leaning forward to press a great lion’s kiss to her forehead, “there were eight. I am sorry, dear one, for making you wait.”
When Susan looks up at him and tries to speak, she finds that she is still angry with him for it, even if only a little. She supposes that all things have their time, but perhaps her anger’s is not up just yet.
“What will you say,” she asks hesitantly, “if I tell you that I don’t forgive you?”
She is afraid of his answer, but she is also too afraid not to ask.
“I would tell you that forgiveness is best given willingly, and that not all anger is evil,” says Aslan, his voice full of warmth. His tail lashes suddenly, once, twice, three times, and he opens his great mouth to breathe on her. When he steps back, there is a door in the sky behind him, twice as tall as Susan. She can see sunlight through it, and trees.
“Now,” he tells her, something of a roar and a laugh in his voice, “Susan the Gentle, Susan of the Southern Sun, Susan the Storyteller, the wandering Queen—now, it is time for you to go home.”
It takes her three steps to reach the door in the air, but before she enters, she finds herself looking back at Aslan one last time, standing there with the sea of lilies behind him.
“Are they there?” she asks, hardly daring to breathe. “Are they waiting for me?”
“Further up,” Aslan chuckles, eyes twinkling, “and further in, dear one.”
She turns back as the waves part and the sky turns silver and ahead of her, she sees it, just as she remembers, and yet more—Narnia.
Home.
And Susan runs.
❅
(“We’ve been waiting,” Peter says into her hair, holding her so tight she can hardly breathe. She doesn’t want him to let go, not ever.
“Yes, for ever so long,” Lucy adds, face buried in Susan’s shoulder, smile bright as the sun.
“You always were the slowest,” Edmund grins, and Peter cuffs him lightly for it, but they’re all laughing.
“I was not,” Susan tells him, because she really wasn’t—there wasn’t a sprint Edmund didn’t lose to her, and everyone knows it. But she’s been slow enough about some things, and quicker still about others. They all have.
“Anyway, it doesn’t matter anymore,” Lucy decides, pulling back to tuck a stray lock of hair behind Susan’s ear, and she can’t help leaning into the touch. “You’re home now.”
“I am,” Susan says, and for the first time, she believes it. “I’ve missed you.”
“And we you,” Peter whispers, dragging them all back into his embrace in a tangle of limbs and laughter and joy restored. None of them manage to get out of the knot of themselves for quite a while, and none of them mind.
Susan thinks this is the happiest she has ever been.)
❅
Once, there were four children. Once, Susan was Queen. And now, always, Susan is home again. She’s home, and it’s only, as they say, the beginning of the adventure.