Susan cinches her quiver-belt too tightly around her waist, shoulders her heaviest longbow, and stalks off into the deepest, densest part of the forest, where even on a summer-warm day, the air is cool and soft. She sets a brisk pace, and she's sweating by the time she's underneath the clawing branches and heavy shade, so deep within that the undergrowth gathers only where the light touches the forest floor around a fallen oak.
The trees here are thick-trunked, strong and tall, and there's a deep hush. Susan doesn't care for the hush; it makes the clamor of thoughts in her head all the louder.
There aren't any established targets here. Susan knows of this spot due to one of her rounds of insect- and soil-sample gathering, but it's not where she typically goes when she wants to train in a less-structured setting. The absence is what she needs. She can pick new spots, harder spots, spots she isn't used to. A crack in the bark of one tree. A shelf fungus on the stump of the fallen oak. A flower, small, in the tiny patch of moss lain over a tumble of what may have, at one point, been boulders.
She fires her arrows quickly, as fast as she can fit each to the string and draw, twisting, whiplike, between every shot to find a new target to inevitably hit. Even though she's not taking considerable time to aim, each point finds its mark. The arrows land deep. Some require all of her strength to yank back out when she retrieves them for her next round.
Susan's memory has never been impeccable. In Narnia, all four of them had forgot London, and England, and anything of the elsewhere that yielded the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve fit to rule a Narnian throne - beyond the fact that there needs must be an elsewhere. She was, of course, the only one to forget Narnia upon their return, but she forgot it thoroughly. The moving stories Edmund and Peter and sweet Lucy would share of their time there didn't phase her. Every time Peter cajoled or Lucy implored or Edmund argued, Susan's own resolve strengthened. Her concern for them mounted. She'd dig her heels in and try all the harder to show them that they were the ones who were wrong.
Select target. Draw. Fire. Turn. Select target.
She keeps detailed notes, mostly to have a rigorous record of the changes of a capricious home, but also because she doesn't trust her own memory. She's far too talented at manipulating it, smoothing over uncomfortable truths with pleasant lies that are less challenging to believe. It's odd - when she'd learned of Aornis's powers, she'd understood that this might mean she'd been led to forget some things. Ultimately, she hadn't sought discrepancies between her notes and her memories (that way lay madness). But when those memories return to her, they're striking only in that they are utterly unremarkable.
Draw.
Aornis had been perfectly pleasant with her at every turn. They'd drink together sometimes, and chat occasionally. Never in any depth, never at any great length, but they were - friendly. Casual acquaintances. Ostensibly interested in some of the same things. Susan finds herself unnerved, and she runs over the memories, again and again, searching for some weak point, some breach that might suggest she's written over Aornis's further manipulations as well as she did Narnia, and England before it. Some sign that she's found yet another pleasant lie to paper over a more unsettling truth. But she finds nothing. The memories slip through her fingers like sand, like water, and she sifts them over and over again. They don't change. It's just casual, studied pleasantness.
For a brief and endless moment, Susan staggers, an ache lancing through her. She wants so badly to talk about this with Edmund. He'd been pleasant and friendly with the White Witch. Aornis was no Jadis, but Susan hasn't got experience being chummy with a villain, and she finds herself revulsed by the knowledge that they got even as close as they did with her still unaware of Aornis's true nature. Edmund would know what to say. He'd either soothe her or tell her there's no soothing but time, and even then she'd know for sure what to anticipate. Without him, she doesn't know. She hates not knowing things, prefers to understand as much as she can as thoroughly as she can. And this - the knowledge that Aornis took from her only memories of pleasant and inoffensive interactions - curdles in her chest, sour and stale, fissioning and tangling into her quagmire of thoughts.
Fire.
Susan has been forgetting London again. Oh, not in any grand sweeping way. Not in the manner she has been prone to forgetting when Narnia is involved in some part of the process. But she can't clearly recall the details of her day-to-day. There was that rug shop between work and classes that she loved... but what time of day would she slip inside? What was her Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy lecturer's name? He was a man with a mustard stain on the pocket of his favorite tweed blazer. Certainly he had a name. Susan can't even recall which letter that name began with, though. She remembers holding court in the pubs in Holborn, and the scratched-up finish on the surface of the bar in her favorite, but not the route she'd take to get there from Miriam's flat.
Ingrid's hair was straight and yellow and often twisted up into a chignon held by an old hat-pin; her eyes were deep brown. Her couch was secondhand and sagging in the middle, and there was always a big cranky cat nestled on the back of it. But what color was the couch underneath its age? Miriam's hair was curlier. Darker. She had a freckle underneath her left breast and runs in most of her stockings. But what lipstick did she prefer? Were her shoes scuffed at the toe, or is Susan thinking - God forbid - of Lucy's? She's not angry to be here any more, like she was when she first arrived. She's not upset that her life has been thoroughly interrupted. She's found happiness here, and a new shape for her life to take. Ultimately, she's always been adaptable to changing direction after changing worlds. But as the bowstring thwaps against her bracers hard enough that she knows she'd have a welt if she left them off, she's forced to acknowledge that she doesn't remember the vagaries of what, precisely, has been interrupted by her arrival here. Is this forgetting the natural course of a mind set to a new future, or something more insidious? Ought she be concerned?
Turn.
Susan retrieves her arrows again, freeing them from wood and bracken with sharp, firm pulls that broker no argument from their points. Already she can feel the ache in her shoulders and the way her back shall knot up, eventually, from the intermittent stillness and swift changes of her posture. She's spent so much time here missing the idea of Narnia while loathing many of its implications as she unearths them. It's been hitting her with astonishing regularity especially lately: the feeling of loss, the wish things might be different. The stars are wrong here, but when given the opportunity, she'd searched for Alambil and Tarva. Not for any of those she knows from blacked-out London. Not any of the ones covered in classes and books and all the great literature.
Aornis came from England. A rather different England, to be sure, but still one more similar to Susan's than essentially anyone here save Thomas, who has been absent of late. It was one of the things they discussed, mildly, companionably, over cocktails. But Susan is fairly certain none of Aornis's memory-work took away her knowledge of her own England. No, that's all Susan's own foibles, organic to her own limited mind.
Select target.
Susan is frankly fed up with the limitations of her memory. She's unhappy with the pretty little gaps in it that she papers over thickly enough that it becomes hard to tell whether and where there's been an excision. The worst part is her well-honed sense of guilt about it all. When the Pevensie children all gave themselves over to Narnia and forgot home, they sacrificed childhood for duty, and their parents for Aslan and power. When Susan put Narnia from her mind back in London and focused on growing up, it was another rejection of her family, and one she can never now reconcile. What might forgetting the details of her life before this land imply? Has she truly focused so much on trying to remember Narnia - even the worst bits of it - and on building a life here that she's doubly rejected her first and longest home, and (again) those who were important to her within it?
She misses her next shot and, in a fit of pique, casts her bow to the side, crosses her arms, and stamps her feet, letting loose a frustrated growl of a yell that she swallows as soon as she hears the sound. As if there might be some being watching, ready to intervene and make things a little less discomfiting for a woman indulging in a tawdry little temper tantrum.
But there's nothing in the clearing save one Susan Pevensie, who can't even tell whether she's enraged, devastated, or numb. She sinks to her knees, digging her hands into leaf matter and loam, and closes her eyes. Breathes in deep. Tries to set herself in order without plastering over all those jagged edges inside of her. It takes a long, long time, and she's deathly silent throughout the process. Her jaw is set; her eyes are closed. One fat tear winds its way down her cheek and slips into the furrow by her nose, hot and slow. She tastes its salt when it reaches the corner of her mouth and then grimly rises again and retrieves the bow. It's easy to keep herself from rolling her eyes at her own melodramatics - she often holds tight control over her actions and expressions. It's less easy to keep from indulging further in the maudlin flush suffusing her.
Draw.
Fire.
Turn.
Turn.
Turn.
Turn.
When Susan packs it up to go back to the mansion, it's only because she physically can't shoot any more. First she starts missing her exacting targets, then her arrows start flying wider and wider. The sweat trickling into her eyes and down her back - despite the coolness of the shadows here - certainly doesn't help. She's entirely too worn out to yank the last deeply-embedded arrow from its home in the dirt at the roots of a sapling struggling to reach enough sun to thrive, and so she leaves it behind. Her pace as she trods the path home is slow, but steady. Ambient noise ticks up apace with the sunshiney heat the closer she gets: first the chattering animals and the crash of waves on the new shore, then the murmur and shuffle of wedding preparations in the gardens, and finally the distant hum of voices shared between people going about their days as she draws closer and then pushes inside.
Her hands are trembling from the exertion by the time she reaches her rooms, and it takes a few tries for her to fumble the quiver belt free. Rather than putting everything in its proper place, she leans it and the bow against the wall. She can't manage the buttons on her dress, so she yanks it over her head - she shall take it to the tailor to repair the seam later, and let him extract some story of home in trade, and perhaps etch the story deeper into her mind in the process.
Regina comes to investigate her bow and quiver and the pile of clothes on the floor. Aside from Susan's jumbled pile of books next to her favorite armchair, both she and Lancelot are both rather fastidiously neat; Regina hasn't got the opportunity to sniff around items discarded on the floor with terrible frequency. Susan watches for a moment, wondering if she ought to get them out of range of tooth and claw, but can't muster up enough energy to be concerned. Instead, she runs a hot bath, crawls inside, and curls up, waiting for the chill at the heart of her to start leeching away or for anything to rouse her from her ill spirits.
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