# [closed post]

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan has devised another activity to occupy her days. By the calendar's reckoning, the start of spring is roughly a week away. Between her and Tress, they've got the outline of a plan for the next Dark, and Susan is happy to rely on people who've got greater interest in and skill for growing things insofar as agriculture goes. But the growing season here shall be longer than usual, and Susan should like to have some idea about what that might mean for the ecosystem,

This is her flimsy excuse to pardon the latest stack of books she's currently carrying out of the library. There is a marginal off-chance that preparatory reading on soil biota could, potentially, be useful. Perhaps she might even talk someone else into reading on the subject as well, so that they might discuss it.

Comments

[onthewillowsthere]

He touches the sword at his hip. "I'm beginning over."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Beginning over?"

[onthewillowsthere]

"It was a test, and I failed. God has no more use for me."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan frowns, leaning forward. If she stopped to think of what she knew of Galahad's story, she might put two and two together more quickly, but she's been remarkably successful at putting old legends out of her mind when talking to their sources, and all she sees before her is a young man she cares for - rather a lot, as it turns out - saying words that would be devastating from Edmund or Lucy. "Are you all right?"

[onthewillowsthere]

A long silence follows, before Galahad finally says, "I feel-- discarded."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan is a tactile woman; without thinking, she reaches to grasp Galahad's hand. His story is coming back to her now, overlaid with the things he's specifically told her during their conversations, and she can make some assumptions about what must have happened. "I've felt--" not precisely the same way "--similarly," she say, quietly.

[onthewillowsthere]

"I'm not sorry. But I'm angry." He doesn't pull his hands away. He likes being touched.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Yes," Susan agrees. "I'm often furious."

[onthewillowsthere]

"I told you I was angry before. I'm angrier now."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan gives him one of her sharp, piercing looks. "You hadn't truly been discarded before, had you? But you are now?"

[onthewillowsthere]

"Before-- I wasn't myself when I broke my vows. I thought it must have still counted, but I was wrong. This time He stripped me of the power He had given me." A silence. "He knew I would. That's why He sent the visions. He was trying to turn me back."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"He oughtn't have the right," says Susan, fiercely. "Oh, I get that He's God, but it's jolly cruel."

[onthewillowsthere]

"I am a cup He fashioned, and I have cracked open and He cannot use me."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Sex and love aren't destructive," Susan says, unintentionally stern. "They're productive and good. God oughtn't act like a jealous lover." She remembers, then, the conversation she'd had with Claudius about this sort of thing so many months ago. Ought she say to Galahad what she said to Claudius? It's rather crude, after all.

[onthewillowsthere]

Galahad tilts his head. It doesn't seem as though she's done.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan stirs her sugar into her tea slowly, and decides as she does that she hasn't got any good reason to be circumspect. "I told your Claudius once that God often acts like a man who doesn't properly know how to use his, ah. Uninspiring prick," she confesses.

[onthewillowsthere]

"I don't know what that's like," with a faint wryness.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Then I'm very pleased for you," says Susan, breaking her Jaffa cake neatly in half.

[onthewillowsthere]

"Is it that bad?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"How God has treated us, or a man who doesn't know how to use his uninspiring prick?"

[onthewillowsthere]

"I know about the first one."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Too true. Susan gives him a soft look, squeezes his hand and then releases it, and says, "In that case, it's very nearly as dreadful." This is only partially a joke.

[onthewillowsthere]

Gravely, "I'll try to avoid it."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan twists around to retrieve a little dish from the sideboard for the tea bags. "I expect you're in good hands with your Claudius," she says, as she turns back around and starts fishing her bag out of her mug.

[onthewillowsthere]

He gives her a faintly curious look. "You don't know." But of course that's not really a surprise; Claudius likes to say that he prefers younger men and older women. Galahad isn't good at telling how old people are, but he's fairly sure Susan is more his age than Claudius'. Still, sex is a language for Claudius, and it sometimes takes Galahad by surprise that he hasn't tried to speak it with everyone.