Work Text:
Her canines are too blunt.
It’s become a habit for Lucy: prodding at them with her tongue, pressing into them as hard as she can, and being disappointed when she cannot even pierce herself on them.
She’s unsure how or why her teeth grew the way they did in Narnia. They had simply shaped to be as wild as she was, those four teeth far more prominent than the rest in their length and sharpness—practically fangs, Peter had called them. Always ready to be bared, whether that be in a smile, or in a snarl. Her common grins had become both a bringer of joy, as well as a warning.
Edmund had been fond of this, of how her jubilance and her ferocity came in spades. He had always said that it had suited her, for her smile to be what could make even the most powerful of men shudder in fear.
The Lion Queen, they had called her.
The blood of Aslan in her veins,
Her wild hair casts his mane
Her great love imbues our land
Her lion’s teeth bring fear to man
Her bravery doth fill our souls
Her smiles bring forth our own
And brings prey to their knees
All hail our valiant Lion Queen!
Her brothers and sister all had similar hymns and praises written for them.
Peter obviously got the most of the lot, being the High King. They sung across the land of his gold-woven hair and gold-plated heart, his silver-tinted eyes and shining blade, his open arms and his unyielding fists.
Edmund had been hailed as the bearer of two swords, one in mind and one in hand, each wielded justly and surely. It was said that any being to find themself on end of either one must choose their next words very carefully, lest they be their last.
And, as many shallow and fickle songs as Susan had received which praised only her beauty, so did she receive many ballads of eyes as piercing as her bow, never to miss their target. Of a gentleness so great that the strike of her arrow was always a painless death—though perhaps only for being so quick, due to the precision of her aim.
But Lucy had always liked her little praises the most. And not just because they were for her, but because of how each one claimed her. How each song for her acknowledged her as Narnia’s own, as being one with the soil and the sea, with the trees and the wind, the daughter of Aslan with the land’s Magic roaring in her veins.
Our Lucy, our Lion Queen, her people had sung, and she had been theirs as much as they had been hers. Her every smile was shared by them, and her brutality was always in the name of their peace and prosperity.
None of that has changed.
Her body has changed. Her teeth are blunt, and she is small and skinny and her hair is too short. Her palms are too soft, and she has to make an effort to re-learn how to sit with her shoulders back and head high, as this little frame had once been so used to curling in on itself.
The world has changed too, obviously. It is exactly as they had left it, except now she notices the grey of the skies far more often, and laments the glaring lack of bird song and chittering to wake her in the mornings. The trees, though very alive, all seem so dead, and the water in lakes and ponds have no melody in their rippling.
But she is still Lucy The Valiant. Still the Lion Queen. Even removed from her world, she knows it will always belong to her, and she will always belong to it. Which is why, upon coming back through the wardrobe, she had mourned more than any of them, and why now, after a year, she has adjusted the most—though Susan seems desperate to pretend that she has fully come to terms with it all,
Lucy had sobbed and screamed and banged her little fists against walls for a month after their unexpected departure, begging to be taken home. Despite the Professor’s words, she had visited the wardrobe every day, had sat outside it for hours. But time has passed, and she is certainly not happier now than she had been there, but she’s alright. Because she knows that it is waiting for her, and that it is still within her.
Yes, she is not home. Yes, this body is not as it used to be. But that’s okay. Even when she misses Narnia to the point of physical ache, she is soothed by the knowledge that it is not gone; it is a part of her still, and always shall be. That is enough.
Her siblings haven’t been coping quite as well.
She worries for Peter greatly. His grief had been the quietest for a while, until it had become anger, and then violence. He fights schoolboys as though he is still in the body that was strong enough to take on three grown men—because he wishes he was in that body, she thinks. Because the bruising and the bleeding are temporary replacements for fifteen years of scars lost. He seems to believe himself no longer a King, and is desperately trying to reassert that sense of power and belonging that does not come naturally to him in England.
It’s foolish and dangerous, and she aches, because she knows that no words could quell what rages within him. Of course she feels that same grief and that yearning for home, of course she wishes for a body that feels like her own again. What kind of comfort can you provide for something like this? All she can do is clean up his bloody noses and kiss his bruised eyelids, try her best to convey that he is understood, that his true self is still seen and known. That he is still her High King.
She hopes that at least Edmund’s increasing involvement in his fights will snap Peter out of it.
Edmund, who is always throwing himself to the wolves, always ending the fights Peter starts, and creating endless excuses for him. He was the one who had sat beside Lucy for hours at the wardrobe, and who had braided Susan’s hair when she was sad in the way she used to have it done back at Cair Paravel. He is a stable presence, but even after all this time, Lucy can see that every one of these actions soothes not only them, but him. Being back in his young body, he had admitted once to her that it reminded him in sharp clarity of how it had felt when his lithe frame had trudged through the snow to the White Witch’s castle, how shackles had hung loose on thin legs. The memory of what he is fades to what he was: King Edmund the Just to Ed the traitor.
And so he is the balm, still using his tongue and his mind as often as he had before, but now to comfort Lucy, to talk down Peter, and to appeal to Susan. And Lucy knows that to him, it all feels like atonement. How he looks at himself in the mirror with disgust, and assumes they must all look at him the same. How he feels the need to tend to a wound that had long since healed over, picking it fresh in his mind. And all Lucy can do is let him. She knows confronting him about it would bring nothing, that he would clamp down and hide away. So she lets him tend to them, lets him be attentive and protective and always the first to take responsibility, because she sees how each action is a shaky hand holding a stitch.
Susan, at a glance, is the one to worry the least about. She’s always insisting to the rest of them that they stop dwelling so much on what they had been, and focus on what was. Wearing fashionable dresses, throwing herself into her schoolwork and constantly flashing smiles that Lucy knows aren’t quite genuine, her solution seems to be trying to compress herself back into her young body and force everything to fit just right again.
But Lucy knows that it doesn’t work. Because Susans hums old Narnian lullabies to herself when she isn’t paying attention, and far too often her right arm spasms and her fist clenches, as though she had been about to reach for a bow slung over her back. And she sleeps the most fitfully out of the lot of them; excessive makeup is used to cover bags under her eyes, and many late nights she can be found sitting down in the kitchen by herself, staring unseeing into the darkness.
Lucy wants to take her sister by the shoulders and pull her into a hug, to take her hand and tell her stories, to remind her that she is something wonderful. That she doesn’t have to force herself to leave everything behind, to squeeze her whole life and sense of self into the uncomfortable looking shoes that she squeezes on. But, knowing how she is kept up at night, how Narnia creeps into her unknowing movements and mannerisms, Lucy suspects that Susan needs to pretend. That it’s the only thing that keeps the loss of their past lives from overwhelming her. And so she doesn’t push it.
Lucy watches her siblings closely, and aches so horribly for them, because she understands. She understands in a way that she fears they don’t—won’t—that they are all misshaped now, and that they cannot attempt to shift themselves nor the world around them to find a better fit. They are who they are, and England is what it is.
Lucy accepts this. She does not try to fight the circumstances, nor does she let them take away her true self from her. She does not let her frailness erase the memory of a body attuned to horseback and archery and sparring, does not allow herself to regress back into someone she had long left behind.
But still, she runs her tongue over her teeth. Still she presses it hard against her upper canine, and is crestfallen when she does not taste blood. Still she smiles at herself in the mirror, and it does not look like her.
She has adjusted the most out of all of them, because she accepts. She accepts both the past and the present, and does not allow them to clash.
Still, nothing will ever feel entirely right again.
Still, to have faith in the Lion Queen that she is may not ever make being referred to as Lucy Pevensie feel natural.
She supposes, out of everything, she has yet to fully accept the future.
“Lucy, stop poking at your teeth,” her Mother scolds. “It’s unbecoming for a young girl.”
She presses her lips together. Bows her head.
Oh, if only she knew just how ‘unbecoming’ Lucy’s true smile was.