^ [open post]

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan doesn't believe in the mansion spirits, but she is being followed by something in a way that makes little sense.

It begins when she wakes up. Opening the drawer to the sideboard in her room to retrieve tea, she finds another gold chess piece wrapped neatly in ribbon. Lancelot didn't put it there - it hadn't been there when she made her pre-sleep cuppa the night before, and she woke up when he did and sleepily saw him off to his training; he hadn't gone near the drawer. She shuts the chess piece firmly away, makes her tea, and dresses blearily for her own archery practice.

There's a new bow in the closet, too. To her pleasure, it's a heavier one that requires a stronger pull - she's quite got used to the draw of the ones the closet first supplied to her.

After her shooting routine, she finds a lipstick in the precise shade Ingrid used to wear on the bathroom vanity. When she's showered and dressed for the rest of her day, she finds her favorite pastry - a sort of breakfast roll she used to get from the shop by the tube station she'd walk past on her way to work, back in London - on a platter in the kitchen.

It's when she opens one of the closets in the hall off the library to return a pile of laundered wash-cloths that she receives both some clarity and a deepening of the mystery: a jumble of assembled balloons tumbles out, made of some queer material and filled with a gas that keeps them afloat. The writing on them reads: HAPPY BIRTHDAY SUSAN PEVENSIE.

She stares at them, perplexed.


Susan's birthday post! Three days (by our reckoning) and eight months (by her reckoning) early! Feel free to have your puppets run into her in any reasonable location at any point during the day; she's just going to be accumulating more Stuff she can't get rid of as the day goes on.

Comments

[onthewillowsthere]

"The two marriages here have been between people who could not have married otherwise," he points out. "I don't believe it is a large enough sample size to draw many conclusions."

[lightbearinglord]

Lan Wangji doesn't mind the wait at all. The slow unfurling of the ritual is at least half of what he likes about serving tea: the enforced pauses, the intervals as he waits for the water to heat, for the leaves to steep, for the delicate little cups and their contents to cool to a tolerable temperature. He watches the slackening of Susan's face, and although he knows her very little, it seems as if he can see the accumulation of burdens and duties she has taken upon herself only in this moment, when she sets them briefly aside.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Three - no, four," says Susan, who is counting both the ineffable and the one that pre-dates its members' arrival. "On the one hand, that's still a vanishingly small sample; on the other, it's nineteen percent of our population." Susan's mental math is good, but not that quick; it's clear she's been thinking about this quite a bit. "But none with any women."

[onthewillowsthere]

It's clear she's been thinking about this quite a bit. Galahad waits.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"So I suppose it's impossible to predict, at the moment, with any degree of accuracy what might become of a marriage."

[onthewillowsthere]

"I believe that is true of all marriages. Claudius and I may one day no longer love one another. We may choose to break our vows. Perhaps we can calculate the probability, but we can't know the future."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan shakes her head. "I mean - the social ramifications. The external pressures and expectations." In all of her thinking, she's come to the conclusion that internally, at least, Lancelot would want to ensure that a marital accord is shaped to Susan's liking. "While marriages between men are the norm here, I believe every resident comes from a place where they've built expectations about how a traditional heterosexual marriage ought to be, and intentionally or not, when one has expectations, one impresses those expectations upon others."

[onthewillowsthere]

"I understand."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

She regards Galahad for a long moment, then nods to herself. "I should like to talk about this with you," she says. "At greater length. But only if it shan't make you uncomfortable." After all, even though Galahad and Lancelot have decided not to proceed as father and son, it doesn't mean such things are necessarily easy to digest.

[onthewillowsthere]

Galahad considers this seriously; Susan deserves a thoughtful answer. Despite his feelings for Lancelot -- like a long-lost cousin, whose wellbeing is somewhat Galahad's responsibility -- when he examines whether it matters to him that Susan and Lancelot marry, or don't marry, he finds nothing. Susan is his friend and fellow scientist. Her comfort and certainty are what matter. Love is not always enough for marriage.

"I'm not uncomfortable," he tells her, and he means it.

[tallyyoungblood]

"I totally respect paper books, though. They should just come with search functions."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan nods once more, sharply, as they start to pick their way along softer ground. "I assumed it wasn't the sort of thing Lancelot might want," she admits.

[onthewillowsthere]

"Why?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan shakes her head, on the verge of a rueful laugh. "Because he hadn't one before," she says, meaning both when he was bound to the queen, and also in all the stories she used to read Edmund.

[onthewillowsthere]

Galahad frowns at her. "He wasn't able to before." Susan certainly seems thoughtful enough to have figured this out; he's a little taken aback that she seems not to have considered it.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"I know," says Susan. "I thought it a convenient coincidence."

[vineleaves]

Dionysus, meanwhile, starts jotting down a list of all the characters they'll need to fill roles for.

[onthewillowsthere]

"But now he has said otherwise."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Not... precisely." Susan fidgets with the hem of her sleeve, then carefully smooths the cloth again. "He's been in a... reflective mood, lately. Since the day all of us were children."

[onthewillowsthere]

"Since I was a child," Galahad says, since this seems to be the heart of the matter.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Since both of you were children, yes."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Such as, for example, an index?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Oh, tremendously."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Right," says Susan, once she's found the appropriate place in her notes. "More people indicated a willingness to participate than auditioned."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

When she opens her eyes again, she gathers her consequence around her. "It smells lovely," she says, and takes a tiny sip.