^ [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

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"I'm familiar," says Susan, trying to recall her notes from the last political science class she took in London.

[lightbearinglord]

With simultaneous interest and trepidation, Lan Wangji takes a mouthful of tea and waits to see whether she volunteers further knowledge of his home and its fate.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Would you like to hear of it? I'm afraid its present circumstance is... complicated."

[lightbearinglord]

This does not sound auspicious. "Gusu? Or all of China?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"All of China, unless - have you any idea what province Suzhou might be in? Or the closest Yuan-controlled municipality? No," she shakes her head. "I believe they've just changed the term... province-administered city, perhaps? -I'm afraid my geographic knowledge is limited."

[lightbearinglord]

"I would have to consult the maps again," Lan Wangji admits. "I only knew it by its landmarks and its location along the coast."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"A moment," says Susan, half-rising so she can work her notebook and pencil out of her pocket. She turns it to an empty page, and does a credible sketch of the borders of China as she remembers it. "There, now we've got a starting point."

[lightbearinglord]

Lan Wangji examines it, intrigued and yet feeling some quiet trepidation at how much must have changed in more than a thousand years. The shape of its coastline is familiar, or familiar enough, but the idea that all these provinces and people came together under the heading of a single country is still an unusual one. Even so, he takes the pencil; his writing is not polished without a brush, but he can draw acceptable characters with some stubbornness. He writes 姑苏, perhaps midway down the portion of easternmost coast that protrudes after it dips in with the incursion of the Yellow Sea. It is slightly west of the coast itself, just beside Biling Lake, whose broad expanse he carefully draws in for reference.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan squints at it. "It seems to be near Nanking and Shanghai," she says; naturally, despite the limitations of her memory, she can easily recall both a recent capital city and one of the ten largest cities in the world.

[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]

"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."

[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?"

[lightbearinglord]

"I have not," he admits. There is an incredible, dizzying volume of human history within the library, waiting for him to catch up on it.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"In the first half of the twentieth century, there were two. So-called because they spanned much of the globe. I arrived here from the aftermath of the second, which officially spanned from 1939 to 1945... though things were rather fraught in the lead-up, too, as you might imagine. From what I understand, things in Asia were already fraught." Susan takes a sip of her tea. She sees no reason to prevaricate, so she says, "Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 - that's nineteen years ago, in my time. This complicated internal friction in China. A civil war was set temporarily aside to resist the invasion, and resumed at its culmination."

[lightbearinglord]

Wars that spanned most of the globe. Lan Wangji can feel his stomach sinking, soured at the thought, although his expression is unchanging and he takes a slow sip of his tea without difficulty. It does not quite surprise him to think that war, global and civil and petty and all-consuming, continues for hundreds of years past his own likely death, if he had stayed. But it does dismay him. He meant it when he told Magnus that he hoped and intended to create a kinder world for the children who came after him. If he succeeded, that success must have melted away under the deluge of history.

In any case, he only nods, quietly absorbing the new information. Susan is not at fault, naturally. "Understood."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan surveys him. "It's dreadful, isn't it?" she says, softly. "I imagine it's terrible to digest all at once."

[lightbearinglord]

"Mn," he agrees, matching her volume. "I fought in a single war, far from large enough to span the globe." And yet, his silence implies, even a small war, a short one, was enough for him.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"I've lived through several," says Susan, quietly. "The second World War, of course, and several in Narnia: the Winter Revolution, the Ettinsmoor War, the Archenland Conflict, the War of Deliverance... I can't say I truly fought in them, but I was... involved. I hate them."

[lightbearinglord]

"I hate them, too." It is a simple declaration, and a quiet one, but one buoyed by perfect sincerity.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Then we are alike in this," says Susan. She's quiet for a moment and then, fiercely, says, "They're dreadful. I imagine some must be necessary, but I can't help but imagine there might be a different way. A better way."

[lightbearinglord]

That burst of idealism endears Susan to Lan Wangji instantly, a little tendril of warmth, one tempered by his own experiences and regrets, unfurling somewhere within him. "Some are, in my experience," he says, "but I find that they last too long and that their effects extend too far."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Yes," she says, thinking of the White Witch. "Yes, precisely."

[lightbearinglord]

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.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan clears her throat and savors a sip of her tea. By the times she sets the cup down again, she's decided she simply wants to say, "So in sum, I'm afraid the situation in China in my time is... complicated."