quote_gentle_unquote: (97. from the heartbreak)
Susan Pevensie ([personal profile] quote_gentle_unquote) wrote2024-12-13 01:19 am

^ [open post]

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.
lanselos_du_lac: (intimacy)

[personal profile] lanselos_du_lac 2025-01-20 03:19 am (UTC)(link)
He, unusally, cups her face in both hands to kiss her. He is so happy, and he loves her so well, and this is going precisely as he planned.
lanselos_du_lac: (intimacy)

[personal profile] lanselos_du_lac 2025-01-20 05:39 pm (UTC)(link)
When he finally breaks the kiss, he doesn't draw back much. He strokes her cheek with a thumb. "Thou'rt perfect," he says softly.
tallyyoungblood: (Default)

[personal profile] tallyyoungblood 2025-01-20 09:29 pm (UTC)(link)
"Most communicate with them all the time. That one only did when activated so that it wouldn't show up when I was scanned for trackers."
tallyyoungblood: (Default)

[personal profile] tallyyoungblood 2025-01-21 03:10 am (UTC)(link)
"Yes. If it did, then they would have seen me stop somewhere for several weeks and come to destroy the Smoke right away." Tally's thought this through dozens of times. Sometimes it just feels easier to blame Shay for putting the thought in her head that she should pretend the locket was from a crush. But Shay wasn't even watching her with David that night. She'd never needed to destroy it. There's no way to get around the thought.
vineleaves: (Worried or something)

[personal profile] vineleaves 2025-01-21 04:24 am (UTC)(link)
"Especially not if it's something they can do from far away." Like Luo Binghe causing Claudius pain from wherever he wanted, or Aornis's ability to just up and change the memories of nearly everyone in the mansion without even so much as touching them.
sorrowandsorrow: (welters)

[personal profile] sorrowandsorrow 2025-01-21 05:19 am (UTC)(link)
"Aye-aye, Your Majesty," Janet says, probably mixing up nautical respect and royal respect in a way you're not really supposed to do. Whatever. She settles her fingers into the spaces between Susan's and pulls her onward, toward the welters field. It's actually made progress, slow and steady, as Janet has hacked her way through the stupid fishbowl-world Circumstances to turn one square into sand, another into continual fire, another into perfectly geometrical water, et cetera.
lightbearinglord: (inner monologuing)

[personal profile] lightbearinglord 2025-01-21 05:38 am (UTC)(link)
Lan Wangji doesn't ask her to elaborate. If she wants to speak on it, she may, but they are not well-acquainted. The knowledge of a small kernel of shared conviction seems like enough for this moment, enough to more than justify the shared pot of tea, too.
sorrowandsorrow: (actual smile)

[personal profile] sorrowandsorrow 2025-01-21 05:50 am (UTC)(link)
The flattery turns Janet unabashedly smug, and the low warmth of Susan's voice in her ear turns her quietly thrilled. "I could've guessed," she says, a smile pulling at her lips, "but stop it some more."
lanselos_du_lac: (intimacy)

[personal profile] lanselos_du_lac 2025-01-21 02:24 pm (UTC)(link)
The setting is as he hoped it would be, as is the look on Susan's face. She's lovely, yes, but more than that she has come to feel essential to him in a way he would never have guessed when they first met. To see her happy, to see how she's opened up since that time, is a tremendous gift. He is not going to take it for granted.

"I suppose," he says softly, "that we should eat."
Edited 2025-01-21 14:26 (UTC)
onthewillowsthere: (contemplation)

[personal profile] onthewillowsthere 2025-01-21 02:29 pm (UTC)(link)
"Why did you choose not to tell her?" momentarily following this thread away from his main question.
onthewillowsthere: (contemplation)

[personal profile] onthewillowsthere 2025-01-21 04:22 pm (UTC)(link)
"I understand. Although you didn't understand your feelings, you didn't attempt to define them either, so she was not mislead by your words."
lanselos_du_lac: (listening)

[personal profile] lanselos_du_lac 2025-01-21 08:03 pm (UTC)(link)
His smile is soft, warm. "I would not have thee starve."

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