^ [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]

"What did you do?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"We tried to sort out how to use it," Susan says, rueful. "It all happened terribly fast, especially to a child's understanding of things."

[onthewillowsthere]

"You should ask Tress for help. She's an inventor."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Oh, what a splendid idea!" Susan exclaims. "That hadn't occurred to me at all."

[onthewillowsthere]

Quietly he feels the warmth of pride, at having done something Claudius could have done -- remembering the talents of the people he knows, and divining who might help whom. Claudius sometimes tells Galahad how he's arranged such partnerships, his fingers fluttering with words as he signs what he's saying. Of course Aleksander has the answer for that, he'll say. So I told Tally-wa to talk to him. Tonight Galahad will tell him about this, and Claudius will smirk, pausing in his evening ritual. Very good, he'll say.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Regardless," Susan says, redirecting her attention back to the task at hand. "Lancelot has been contemplative since his own return to childhood, as well as seeing you as a child." She pauses, buying some time for thought as she skirts around a puddle, considering how much or how little she ought to divulge, then says, "I believe he's contemplating the sort of things he might want, absent the environment of Camelot."

[onthewillowsthere]

This makes perfect sense to Galahad. He has, after all, gone through the same contemplations, deciding what he should be and do without Camelot and God, choosing his own purposes. It has been freeing, but frightening, too, strange and sometimes shameful. Lancelot, too, has been wronged by Camelot and by God. He has suffered because of a divine plan. Perhaps he is also struggling now with what life might hold.

"I understand."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Another, brief hesitation. Then: "Do you and Claudius want children?"

[onthewillowsthere]

"No. Claudius likes being an uncle."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"And you?"

[onthewillowsthere]

That same uncomfortable feeling he had when Tally asked him about children spills through him like molten metal. "No."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

This is an eminently reasonable and sufficiently detailed response. It's good that Galahad and Claudius are on the same page. Susan nods.

[onthewillowsthere]

"You don't either."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan's answer might be no, but she can't bring herself to say no outright. She stares out at the looming treeline and says, "Peter used to call me a little mother. That's my elder brother. I helped our mother with Edmund and Lucy their entire childhoods, and when we were sent from London, I essentially took over their care entirely."

[onthewillowsthere]

Galahad is silent, thoughtful, considering the purpose of these words. Susan isn't someone who speaks just to speak; there's surely significance here. "Did you like it?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Do you know, that's not something I've ever truly considered. It's something I thought necessary at the time, and so I did it because it was expected. Edmund didn't often care for it. Lucy, who was littlest, did. At times I think I was as much a mother to her as our mother was." Susan presses her lips together. "Just as it was expected that I would one day marry and have children."

[onthewillowsthere]

"You weren't given choices."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"No," agrees Susan, quietly relieved that Galahad has got it spot-on. "I suppose that's the distinction between Lancelot and I. He hadn't any real choices, either, because of an initial choice he made, but I hadn't any choices largely because of my sex and my position in society and my family. I suppose we're mostly alike, though; I expect we're both trying to sort out what we'd like with choice given - or returned - to us." They're nearly at the marshy area now, and Susan skirts another puddle. "I used to anticipate with such dread the day I'd need to settle down with some man."

[onthewillowsthere]

Galahad nods again. "Does Lancelot understand?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"He knows my longstanding feelings on the matter."

[onthewillowsthere]

"What are you uncertain of?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan sighs. "Several things," she says. "Primarily, I shouldn't want to prevent him from having choices, especially when--"

[onthewillowsthere]

Galahad waits, patiently, and doesn't even look away at the dragonfly that buzzes past his peripheral vision.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"I can't sort out how much of my dread came from not being able to envision falling in love with a man."

[onthewillowsthere]

"Because marriage and motherhood would have been yoked to loving a man."