^ [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

[lanselos_du_lac]

"Thou couldst learn to fence."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

The reservations Susan had about tools of close combat a year ago are still reservations she holds. She dislikes violence, though she quite enjoys her archery training. (She's less likely now to insist that she's better at a distance - she no longer believes many the layers underlying this sort of claim.)

But more than that, she loves this man - this darling, wonderful man who has learned so many things just to be able to discuss her interests with her. "If you teach me," she says, eyes twinkling, "and turn it into a flirtation, then I suppose I could."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Oh, rather," Susan laughs.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Yes," Susan agrees, fervently. "We've got very little recourse for someone violating the tenets of polite society and appropriate behavior."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Yes," says Susan, amused. "I suppose it is."

[sporesprouter]

"It would have been better if it were a successful mutiny, probably..."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"I don't know, I believe becoming captain eventually speaks to some measure of success."

[onthewillowsthere]

"Is that a camera?"

[sporesprouter]

"That wasn't because of the mutiny, though, even if it happened pretty soon after."

[sorrowandsorrow]

"And I'll be fucked if I'm going to make that day your birthday." Janet's fervor comes around to something dangerously genuine as they step out the door of the mansion and onto the front lawn.

[lanselos_du_lac]

He glances over, a little surprised. "I can easily turn it into a flirtation, but I did not expect thee to agree."

[lightbearinglord]

"Neither name is familiar to me," Lan Wangji says. He is not quite apologetic -- he can do nothing about the inevitable fact of history altering the landscape and the map. But he is aware of how little this gives Susan.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"You love swordplay."

[lanselos_du_lac]

"That is true, but thou needst not."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"It has camera-like qualities. It hasn't got film though; I've got no idea how to turn the images into proper photographs. Crowley says it's a telephone."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"No," she agrees. "But you've done ever so much to familiarize yourself with my interests. I should like to try the same. If I find I don't enjoy it, I shan't persist, and we can find a different sort of activity that suits both of us." A new sort of dance, perhaps, or additional lovemaking.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Tress," says Susan, in the same sort of counseling tones she might have, at one point, used to talk Lucy through a thorny situation with her school-mates, "I do hope you don't take this the wrong way, but - you really oughtn't diminish your presence."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan snags Janet then, tugging her arm and guiding her into a kiss that's far, far more intent than she usually goes for in public spaces.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Then I shall speak in generalities. Do you know of Manchuria?" Susan taps the northeastern bit of her map. "Or Japan? The island nation off the coast of Manchuria and the Korean peninsula? - Or perhaps... I believe historically it has also been called the Chosen peninsula."

[lightbearinglord]

"I know it as Samhan," Lan Wangji says. He knows the term Korean now thanks to having discussed the Korean restaurant beneath Magnus' home with his mother before her death. "The island off that coast is called Dongying."

[sorrowandsorrow]

Janet's very familiar with Susan's standards for public propriety, and the exception that's being made for her isn't going unnoticed. It may, however, go unremarked upon. Her mouth is occupied, and so is she, with returning the kiss, fervor melting into it.

[tallyyoungblood]

"Do you think I could make it as a Rusty?" Tally asks.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan nods, acknowledging that the existence of these areas is, at least, known to Lan Wangji. "Have you heard of the World Wars?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan tangles a hand in Janet's growing hair, using the grip to deepen the kiss, long enough that when she pulls back she's breathless and smiling. "Just getting a little taste for what's to come," she says, visibly smug, and pats Janet's chest.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"I can't imagine that it would be terribly different from living here."